‘Can’t get away with it’: The F1 rules have turned against Max Verstappen. He won’t care

Max Verstappen was keeping an eye on his mirrors.

His margin had been reduced to nothing, and on the run down the braking zone he was overtaken on his right-hand side with the help of DRS.

As he barrelled towards the approaching left-hander, almost without thinking the Dutchman released the brakes and opened the steering, sending both cars wide in a last-ditch and vain attempt to hold position.

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This isn’t Verstappen attempting to defend against Lando Norris at the United States Grand Prix or in Mexico last week.

It’s the 2021 São Paulo Grand Prix, and Verstappen is throwing everything at keeping Lewis Hamilton at bay to try to snuff out any hope of a title comeback by the seven-time champion.

Verstappen got to the apex of Descida do Lago first, but only because he was carrying far too much speed to make the corner. He sailed way off the track, taking Hamilton off with him.

They rejoined with the order unchanged, Verstappen still ahead. Remarkably the stewards decided against and investigation.

“That’s all about ‘let them race’,” Red Bull Racing sporting director Jonathan Wheatley argued at the time.

It’s a phrase that summed up a season in which the sport attempted to play fast and loose with its own rules to spectacular and spectacularly controversial effect.

Hamilton was on a mission that weekend and eventually barged past Verstappen to win the race, the first of three successive victories that levelled the title protagonists on points for the season finale, the infamous 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

That campaign was lightning in a bottle. Formula 1’s popularity was just beginning to boom, and millions of new fans who’d binged Drive to Survive during the pandemic dived directly into one of the most fraught title battles in the sport’s history. The long and gruelling season made pantomime characters out of the Mercedes and Red Bull Racing. It was unmissable television.

But it also burnt Formula 1, and the scars are still evident three years on.

The now weekly controversy following Verstappen’s driving etiquette can be traced directly back to 2021, the precedents it set and the attempts by the governing body, the FIA, to gradually shuffle the sport’s rules of engagement back to the sensible centre.

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THE 2021 SEASON SPURS RULES SHIFT

Brazil was far from 2021’s only flashpoint. Verstappen and Hamilton had already crashed in Silverstone and Monza by then, and just a few weeks later they would come to blows in an unhinged battle for victory at the inaugural Saudi Arabian Grand Prix in Jeddah.

The sport’s collective nerves were so frayed by the time of the Abu Dhabi finale that then race director Michael Masi pre-emptively warned that any hint of deliberately underhanded driving could result in points deductions or even disqualification.

It worked, but only just, with the two drivers making contact on the first lap at turn 6, where Hamilton retained the lead by running off the track. The stewards judged Verstappen to have forced him off the road and took no action.

That incident would be forgotten by the end of the night, with a far bigger controversy swallowing the sport, but once F1 had regrouped after the breathless season, it resolved to re-evaluate its ‘let them race’ ethos.

By the following March the FIA had taken a new position, issuing a two-page document driving guidelines.

“These guidelines are being issued by the FIA in response to a request from Formula 1 drivers for the FIA to confirm the factors that may be taken into account by the FIA stewards when decisions are made in relation to certain repeated infringements that occur in the course of a season,” it said.

The rulings had been so confusingly lax in 2021, in other words, that even the drivers were no longer sure what was allowed.

The document stepped the sport back from the brink of being an ugly free-for-all, but it also set it down a different path of attempting to codify the art of racing in a way previously unattempted.

From a relatively straightforward document comprising largely commonsense and instinctive racing rules, the guidelines have since evolved into six detailed pages.

The first page lays out the principles of racing and stewarding. The following three pages set down decision-making structures for overtaking in different corner combinations and from the inside or outside line as well as things like track limits and impeding.

The final two pages are an appendix dedicated to explaining the context of the document, including that the FIA intends to use the guidelines developed in Formula 1 to regulate all forms of motorsport in a sort of trickling down of racing rules.

It’s quite the dramatic swing away from having almost no hard racing rules at all, and it hasn’t taken long to generate new problems.

THERE ARE ‘19 OF 20 DRIVERS’ UNITED AGAINST THE RULES — AND VERSTAPPEN

Unsurprisingly, with over-regulation and overprescription, loopholes and flaws have emerged.

The biggest was evident in the United States, where Verstappen pushed Norris off the track but the Briton, not the Dutchman, ended up with the penalty.

In explaining their reasoning for the punishment, the stewards directly referenced the guidelines, which ruled Norris wasn’t entitled to room because he wasn’t ahead at the apex.

But, as in Brazil in 2021, Verstappen had claimed the apex first only because he’d released the brakes and run off the track, gaming the system.

The original 2022 guidelines had stipulated that “the car being overtaken must be capable of making the corner while remaining within the limits of the track”, but that reference had strangely been removed in the intervening years and doesn’t appear on the 2024 document.

Though the guidelines document specifically says it’s “not binding” on the stewards, it’s become so weighty that evidently they felt a need to at least partially defer to it.

Verstappen was in the clear.

But to almost every driver it felt wrong. George Russell, a director of the Grand Prix Drivers Association, has since said that “19 of 20 drivers” agreed that the rules needed changing to prevent the same outcome at future races.

Hamilton, intimately familiar with Verstappen’s racing style, said, “You shouldn’t be able to come off the brakes and run more speed in and go off the track and still hold your place”.

On Friday night at the Mexico City Grand Prix the drivers made their displeasure known to the FIA in their regular briefing.

The governing body has committed to rewriting the guidelines and presenting the drivers with a new document at the Qatar Grand Prix, the penultimate round of the season, next month.

Reportedly the FIA intends to enforce the updated rules from 2025 for the sake of consistency this season. The drivers have argued for immediate implementation given consistency is meaningless if the wrong calls are being made.

They didn’t have to wait long to find out if their pleas were being heeded, with Verstappen and Norris coming to blows not once but twice in the opening laps of Sunday’s race.

‘GOT WHAT HE HAD COMING TO HIM’

The set-up couldn’t have been more perfect.

Norris had a great run on Verstappen down to turn 4, just as he had in the United States a week earlier and just as Hamilton had in Brazil three years prior.

Knowing he was going to be run out of room, the Briton made a point of clinging to Verstappen’s right until they made contact. Only then did he dive off track.

He’d made his point — that his off-track overtake had been forced by Verstappen’s driving. If those previous two incidents were in any way grey, this was black and white.

The stewards responded by slapping Verstappen with a 10-second penalty.

Apparently incensed by how his elbow-out defence had this time backfired, the Dutchman dramatically ran himself and Norris off the road at turn 7 to retake the place, incurring another penalty.

“At the moment you’re seeing a number of manoeuvres that are getting beyond entertaining or beyond sporting,” Russell said, per Autosport. “It’s just almost unfair to a point now.

“You can argue the first one was maybe 60-40. The last one, I’ve not seen anything like that since probably Brazil [2021].

“I’m glad to see those incidents were punished, and I suspect moving forward in Brazil [this weekend] what we saw today and what we saw last week you won’t be able to get away with.”

Norris, who was crashed out of the Austrian Grand Prix by a Verstappen defensive move before losing third in the United States, has long been torn between his off-track friendship with the Dutchman and increasingly clear misgivings about the way he races.

He made his clearest declaration yet after recovering to second in Mexico.

“I did everything I’ve been told in terms of what the rules are and the guidelines and all of this stuff, yet it just wasn’t to be, and of course he got some penalties for that,” he said.

“It’s clear that it doesn’t matter if he wins or second, his only job is to beat me in the race, and he’ll sacrifice himself to do that, like he did today.

“But I want to have good battles with him. I want to have those tough battles, like I’ve seen him have plenty of times, but fair ones.

“I think today was a step too far from both of those, and it was clear that the stewards agreed with that.

“I hope Max acknowledges that he took it a step too far.

“Today was not fair, clean racing, and therefore, I think he got what he had coming to him.”

VERSTAPPEN STILL DRIVING LIKE IT’S 2021

Asked for his view on the penalties after the race, Verstappen deflected to the performance of his car.

“That was also honestly not my biggest problem of the race,” he said. “My biggest problem was that we just had no pace — just struggling a lot on the tyres, couldn’t really attack, and I couldn’t follow Ferrari and McLaren.”

It was a similar story in Austria earlier this year, where Verstappen answered questions about his crash with criticism of the car and by lamenting his team had putting him in a defensive position in the first place.

It is in fact a common thread through all Verstappen’s most controversial moments.

In 2021 his crash with Hamilton in Italy came one race after he took the title lead and was desperate to prevent the Briton from hitting back in what appeared to be the quicker car.

In Brazil it came as he was attempting to snuff out Hamilton’s title hopes, the Mercedes again the faster car.

In Saudi Arabia Hamilton again had better pace and was targeting a third-straight win to level the points at the final race.

Now, in Mexico, he found himself with an uncompetitive car and facing a title rival who had the chance to take big points out of his championship lead.

He responded by throwing both of them off the road, and while he copped a penalty, he ensured Norris wouldn’t have the chance to contend for victory, limiting the damage.

Whenever Verstappen finds the odds stacked against him and his chance of victory out of his hands, he thrashes.

He’s such a high-quality, instinctive racer that he often spectacularly lands just — just — within the regulations.

But there’s now a growing set of cases in which he simply goes too far.

“The problem behind it is that if you don’t address these things honestly, they will come back,” McLaren boss Andrea Stella warned prophetically in Austria earlier this year after Norris and Verstappen crashed battling for the lead.

“They came back [at the Red Bull Ring] because they were not addressed properly in the past when there were some fights with Lewis that needed to be punished in a harsher way.

He later added, per The Race: “We don’t want to see another 2021. I thought that was not a good point in Formula 1 racing. It might have been entertaining, but not for good reasons.”

It now appears the sport is ready to move beyond Verstappen’s aggressive approach.

The stewards in Mexico City set a precedent, and soon the FIA will codify a new set of driving expectations that will incorporate the views of most drivers.

Verstappen, however, gave short shrift to the idea that it will change his behaviour.

“I just drive how I think I have to drive,” he said.

For Verstappen’s it’s never stopped being 2021.

In a sense you can’t blame him. That year his instinctive, no-holds-barred style won him his first title over one of the greatest of all time.

That approach has survived almost three versions of driving guidelines that had attempted to evolve Formula 1 beyond that season.

But as F1 returns to Brazil three years after his infamous clash with Hamilton at Descida do Lago, the sport finally looks ready to move on from 2021 whether he’s ready or not.