Verstappen and Norris’ Austrian GP Scrap Showed A Disheartening Side Of F1

The 2024 Austrian Grand Prix almost became an absolute classic. Max Verstappen had been on course for another easy win before a poor pit stop by his Red Bull crew suddenly once again thrust McLaren’s Lando Norris into contention for victory.

With all this happening at the final pit cycle, we were left with an exciting prospect – arguably the grid’s two fastest drivers, in unquestionably its two fastest cars, going one-on-one for the final 19 laps of the race.

It could have been a thrilling finish, but as you’ll have doubtless seen by now, it all ended with a slightly clumsy low-speed collision between the two as Max got his elbows out a bit too much on lap 64. Both drivers got punctures, gifting the win to an unsuspecting but entirely deserving George Russell.

I’m not here to discuss the intricacies of the Max-Lando tangle, or to place blame. That’s the job of the stewards, who’ve already landed it squarely on the Dutch driver, giving him a 10-second penalty that amounted to nothing more than a slap on the wrist given it had no bearing on his eventual fifth-place finish. For his part, Lando was penalised five seconds for abusing track limits – an equally meaningless punishment given McLaren retired the car.

No, what I want to talk about is something that undermined what was otherwise a thrilling on-track ding-dong between this season’s biggest contenders. The fact that we get access to snippets of team radio is undoubtedly a plus of the modern sport – where would we be without recent meme-worthy gems like “GP2 engine”, “You will not have the drink”, or “Bono, my tyres are gone”?

But it also means we sometimes see less gratifying sides of the drivers. For the entire duration of their scrap, Lando and Max were both on the blower to their teams, endlessly accusing each other of rule violations in a slightly depressing attempt to claim a win not through either’s considerable talent, but on a technicality.

Lando accused Max of moving too much under braking – and as the stewards decided, his actions crossed the line dividing that from good, hard racing – while Max and Red Bull were watching like hawks for the slightest track limits violation from the Briton. Naturally, both teams will have been feeding all this back to race control, but we’re no longer privy to that to avoid another “No, Mikey, No!” debacle.

It amounts to two drivers racing at the very sharpest point of motorsport’s cutting edge sounding like petulant children, running to their teacher to grass each other up for any perceived rule violation. It’s especially depressing when it undermines a relatively rare thing in modern Formula 1 – a genuinely exciting, wheel-to-wheel fight for the win.

I’m not saying that the rules around track limits, or moving under braking, aren’t worthwhile – rules like this vital to stop any sport being a free-for-all. What I’m saying is that the drivers actively trying to call a race result over these things aren’t what we tune in for – we want to them race, and leave this stuff to the stewards.

Hearing drivers telling on one another is as disheartening as seeing footballers putting on Olympic-worthy diving performances every time someone on the opposing team sneezes near them. Racing drivers are there to race, and officiating bodies are there to officiate – it’s something that both parties should remember.