Lando Norris ‘too obsessed’ with Max Verstappen and ‘line in sand’ now drawn

Max Verstappen and Lando Norris.

F1 press conference host Tom Clarkson said Lando Norris “became too obsessed” with Max Verstappen at the start of the Spanish Grand Prix, with George Russell taking the lead at Turn 1.

Norris recovered to second place behind Verstappen come the chequered flag, but the McLaren driver was left disappointed as he felt he could – and perhaps should – have won the race on Sunday.

Lando Norris has ‘line in the sand’ moment with Max Verstappen in Spain

With the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya having one of the longest runs down to the first braking zone of the season, Norris had time to defend from Verstappen – moving towards the right-hand side of the track to defend from the Red Bull driver.

While Verstappen grazed the grass in turn, Russell was able to move onto the racing line and out-brake the pair of them and take an early lead.

As a result, Clarkson believed that Norris setting his eyes on Verstappen may have cost him at the first corner.

“Now, Lando says that he didn’t make the ideal getaway – he actually thinks he made a better start than Max the initial getaway,” Clarkson explained on the F1 Nation podcast.

“But I would argue strongly that he became too obsessed with Max and went too far to the right-hand side, and that just gave George Russell a clean sweep around the outside of Turn 1, and if he’d stayed a bit to the left, stopped Russell coming through, he could have gone round the outside of Verstappen at Turn 1 anyway – or am I being too harsh?”

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Fellow panellist and former McLaren driver Pedro de la Rosa, explained that Norris’ reaction was the one that most drivers would have had in that scenario, though it is always difficult to judge how to approach the start of any race.

“You might be right,” De la Rosa responded. “You know, it’s just that it’s so difficult when you’re starting a race and your mind is not on looking elsewhere, you’re looking to the guy that’s trying to overtake you at that moment, which was Max.

“He got obsessed on Max, but that’s something that I would have done, every racing driver would have done.”

With that move to defend from Verstappen, however, Clarkson later added that Norris’ robust defending could even be seen as a moment to show the three-time World Champion that they are now racing on equal terms at the front of the field, and he won’t be cowed by threats from behind.

“Now, we haven’t seen Lando and Max go wheel to wheel that much since Lando came into Formula 1 in 2019 because Max has always had the better car, significantly better car on occasions,” he explained.

“That run to Turn 1 when he squeezed Max and actually put him on the grass, I thought it was a line in the sand from Lando, a bit of a marker, as if to say: ‘I’m here and actually we are now racing and you’re not going to walk all over me, and watch out for me.’”

De la Rosa, meanwhile, believed that the McLaren driver could even have gone further in pushing Verstappen towards the boundaries of the track, and had he done so sooner, he could have kept the lead – though he accepted that hindsight is a wonderful thing after the fact.

“I thought that it was a clean move from Lando. Honestly, I think that he could have pushed him harder,” he said.

“If he had positioned his car a bit earlier into the grass, just when he did it, it was too late to do it more because then you obviously are going to squeeze the guy in an illegal way.

“But if he had done it a bit earlier, I think Max would have found himself in a much more difficult situation because he would have seen that George was just side by side.

“But anyway, it’s easy to say – I don’t want to sound like I know everything. It’s true that I think Lando was protective, he was defensive, but he could have pushed him a bit harder.”