Laurence Edmondson, F1 EditorJul 1, 2024, 05:01 PM
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- •Joined ESPN in 2009
•An FIA accredited F1 journalist since 2011
SPIELBERG, Austria -- It was a case of the famous paradox: an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.
Lando Norris had the faster car at Formula One's Austrian Grand Prix on Sunday, but Max Verstappen held the lead. Both in some way felt entitled to victory; neither could stomach second place.
Ultimately, something had to give. After occupying the top two steps of the podium at five of the six races prior to Austria, there was a sense of inevitability that the two drivers would end up squabbling over the same piece of asphalt sooner or later.
Close friends off the track (to the extent that Verstappen partied with Norris into the early hours when he beat the three-time defending world champion to victory in Miami in May), their on-track rivalry has been ratcheting up in recent races. In Miami and Canada, a safety car period conspired to switch their positions (once in favour of Norris, the next in favour of Verstappen), but at the last round in Spain, Norris put Verstappen on the grass on the crucial run down to Turn 1.
There were always smiles after, along with a recognition of each other's talent, but in Austria, the intensity of the battle made for a very different tone.
Norris made four clear attempts to take the lead from Verstappen at Turn 3 on Sunday afternoon.
The first, on Lap 55 of 71, saw him look to the inside, only to be blocked by Verstappen moving across his front wing. It looked as though the Red Bull driver moved under braking -- one of the biggest taboos in wheel-to-wheel racing -- but with Norris able to take avoiding action and neither driver forced off the track, it passed the fair play test and whetted the appetite for what might come next.
On Norris' second attempt four laps later, he signaled his move to the inside later and launched his McLaren to the right of the Red Bull at the last second. In asking his tyres to turn and slow down simultaneously -- a demand this generation of Pirellis routinely struggle with -- Norris locked up under braking and sailed wide through the corner.
In doing so, he exceeded track limits for the fourth time in the race, meaning he was destined for a five-second time penalty. It would have been an unsatisfactory way to decide such an epic battle, and while Verstappen didn't appear to move under braking anywhere near as much as the first occasion, Norris complained in the hope of getting himself off the hook for the track limits infringement.
"He can't keep moving after I've moved, it's just dangerous," Norris said over team radio. "Otherwise we are going to have a big shunt."
Whatever Verstappen was doing under braking, it was keeping Norris behind and, up to that point, avoiding the attention of the stewards. Pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable during wheel-to-wheel racing is all part of Verstappen's driving style -- a hardwired desire to keep the position at all costs.
He routinely gives his rivals the choice of colliding or backing off, but very rarely the option of a clean overtake. It was a trait exposed multiple times during his intense 2021 title battle with Lewis Hamilton, famously resulting in a collision at Monza, and in putting both cars deep in the run-off area in Brazil.
Verstappen's dominance of the following two seasons meant he could more often rely on the performance of his Red Bull to get him out of trouble and rarely had to engage his most uncompromising mindset. On Sunday, though, it was different: If he lost the lead to the McLaren, it was unlikely he'd get it back.
Norris' next attempt at taking the lead saw him claim the apex of the corner, stay within the track limits and force Verstappen wide. It was the kind of move that should have left Verstappen with no answer, but the Red Bull found better traction on the asphalt run-off area beyond the exit kerb and beat the McLaren on a drag race down to Turn 4.
The incident wasn't investigated, but there was a clear case for Verstappen receiving a penalty of his own for going off track and gaining an advantage. It's not clear why the stewards didn't look at it -- Verstappen went on to finish the race after all -- but it was most likely due to the events of the following lap.
After three failed attempts in the space of nine laps to pass on the inside of Turn 3, Norris decided to switch up his approach and try a move on the outside on Lap 64. Verstappen said Norris' change of tack caught him by surprise, but claimed there was nothing malicious about what followed. Regardless of his intent, the positioning of the Red Bull under braking left Norris with a narrowing section of track in which to thread his McLaren and a collision became inevitable as they both stood hard on the brakes.
As the rear tyres of the two cars rubbed against each other and popped off their rims, the debate over Verstappen's racecraft, which has lain dormant during his two dominant seasons in F1, erupted once more. Is he impossible to race against? Is he simply impetuous? Does F1 need to rewrite its rulebook to account for his actions?
It should be noted that none of those arguments question Verstappen's talent. What the three-time world champion can do with a Formula One car, especially in a braking zone, appears to know no bounds. But how he exercises that talent in the heat of the moment ... that was suddenly reopened to debate.
The stewards found Verstappen "predominantly" to blame for the collision, saying "before turning in, the driver of Car 1 turned to the left," i.e., the outside of the track where Norris' car was positioned. A 10-second time penalty was issued to Verstappen after he rejoined the race from the pits, although it made no difference to his fifth-place finishing position at the end of the race.
Norris, meanwhile, was forced to retire in the pits after the flailing rubber of his puncture caused excessive damage to his McLaren's bodywork. George Russell went on to claim victory for Mercedes, with Norris' teammate Oscar Piastri and Carlos Sainz of Ferrari rounding out the podium.
"If he says he did nothing wrong, then I will lose a lot of respect for that," Norris said in a frank and downbeat interview after the race. "If he admits to being a bit stupid and running into me and just being a bit reckless in a way, then I have a small amount of respect for it, but it is still a tough one to take when we're fighting for the win. I'm trying to be fair from my side and he just wasn't."
Norris' McLaren team principal, Andrea Stella, went a step further, saying Verstappen got away with similar moves during 2021, emboldening his aggressive approach. Much like a naughty child who is never told off, Stella suggested Verstappen had consistently been given an inch and had routinely taken a mile.
"In every kind of human dynamics, if you don't address things, as soon as you introduce competition, as soon as you introduce a sense of injustice, these things escalate," Stella said. "It's like anything. Here there was incomplete job, let's say, that comes from the past, and is a legacy that as soon as there was a trigger, immediately there is an outburst. Immediately it became a case that escalated."
Verstappen was utterly calm when he faced the media. In his mind, he should never have found himself in that position and the collision was just an unfortunate consequence of a poor strategy and a sloppy pit stop. When he was asked about his race, he immediately set off on a monologue about the mistakes that had dropped him into the battle with Norris, rather than the incident itself.
"Of course, at the end of that stint I caught quite a bit of traffic which we should have just boxed [out of], because I gave up free lap time," he said. "So we basically did a lot of things wrong today. Firstly, it started with the strategy, then the pitstops were a disaster. The first one was already bad, the second one was even more of a disaster.
"And then, of course, you give free lap time. There's seconds you give away, six seconds over those two pitstops. And then, it's a race again. And that's why I think also we put ourselves in that position for, unfortunately, an accident to happen between us, which you never want to happen."
Verstappen's Red Bull had looked increasingly dominant over the course of the Austrian Grand Prix weekend, winning Saturday's sprint race and then securing pole position ahead of Norris by 0.4 seconds in qualifying. The eight-second lead he built up in the first half of the race was eroded slightly when he hit traffic ahead of his final tyre change, but he still entered the pits with a commanding margin over Norris.
Then came an uncharacteristically slow stop from the Red Bull pit crew as the left rear wheel nut became stuck in the 30-degree heat. Verstappen was stationary for 6.5 seconds, allowing Norris, who was serviced in nearly half the time, to exit the pits just 2.9 seconds behind the Red Bull. On his out lap, Verstappen locked up at Turn 4, losing him a further second to Norris, and suddenly the race was on.
Norris, aided by a fresh set of medium-compound tyres, hounded Verstappen on a pre-used set of the mediums. The difference in the freshness of the respective tyres, related to Red Bull's incorrect belief that it would be more beneficial to save sets of hard tyres for the race, was key to Norris getting within overtaking range of the Red Bull.
Verstappen has rarely taken the blame for any incident in his career, and made no exception on Sunday. On this occasion he seemed to be shifting the focus towards the team's errors rather than his own, regularly skirting around the details of the incident itself. When asked directly about the collision, he challenged the suggestion he had moved under braking in front of Norris and deflected some blame back toward his competitor.
"For me it was not moving under braking because every time I moved I was not braking already," he said. "Of course from the outside, it always looks like that. But I think I know fairly well what to do in these scenarios.
"Also a few of those were really late divebombs, so it was a bit of a sending it up the inside and just hope the other guy steers out of it, which is not always how you race. But it's just that the corner here lends to that as well. I've been in the other position as well, when you go for it and it's just the shape of the corner.
"And I think the move that we got together was something that I didn't expect, because I saw him coming, I had the front a little bit on the inside and then under braking we touched the rear tyres and we both got a puncture from it, which is, of course, something you don't want to happen."
Racing Formula One cars in a fair manner requires a degree of cooperation. In blocking Norris under braking on the first attempt on Lap 55, Verstappen set the tone for the battle to come.
Norris then had to adapt how early he telegraphed his moves and refine how late he stood on the brakes. In Verstappen's eyes, that then meant the McLaren was "divebombing" -- an accusation laden with irony given his own late-braking moves in his career -- and it upped the stakes again.
The potential track limits penalty hanging over Norris after Lap 59 added an awkward complexity to the battle, and meant even the cleanest overtake might not result in victory. Until the penalty was confirmed, though, neither driver could change their approach.
In the co*ckpit of the McLaren, Norris was determined to make up for his missed opportunities in Imola, Canada and Spain -- not to mention Saturday's sprint race in Austria, when he overtook Verstappen for the lead at Turn 3 only to leave the door open to be repassed at Turn 4. After weeks of open and public self-criticism, he now had the chance to set things right ... if only he could get past the Red Bull.
Meanwhile, Verstappen was in danger of having a race that looked easily won 30 minutes earlier torn away from him. The sudden pressure from Norris was mainly down to factors outside of his control, yet it now fell on him to make the difference and secure the win ... if only he could keep the McLaren behind.
And so, on Lap 64, the unstoppable force met the immovable object in the braking zone of Turn 3. To avoid such paradoxes, F1's rulebook looks more favourably on unstoppable forces than immovable objects -- hence the decision to penalise Verstappen -- but that made no difference to the inevitability of this collision.
