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| Max Verstappen and Lando Norris battled intensely in Sunday's Austrian Grand Prix, ultimately colliding on Lap 64. EPA/MARTIN DIVISEK |
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.
- Laurence Edmondson, F1 Editor
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