Ex-Red Bull Driver Calls McLaren “Naive” for Not Giving Max Verstappen Position Back

The United States Grand Prix proved to be another disappointing weekend for Lando Norris as title rival Max Verstappen increased his advantage in the championship by another five points. After his failure to beat the Dutchman in the sprint race, Norris had a golden chance to win the Grand Prix on Sunday.

However, as per ex-Red Bull driver David Coulthard, a mistake from McLaren resulted in Norris losing out. Coulthard claimed on the Formula for Success podcast that McLaren should have instructed Norris to give the place back to Verstappen after the Briton overtook him off the track, a move that eventually resulted in the 24-year-old receiving a five-second penalty.

The penalty proved costly in the end as it was enough for Verstappen to finish ahead of Norris in the classification despite finishing behind the Briton on the race track. Speaking of it, Coulthard said,

“I think it was a brilliant bit of aggressive strategic understanding of the rules by Max and it was a slightly naive position for McLaren. Lando, I think, on the in-lap kind of asked, ‘Why didn’t I give the place back'”.

Verstappen was quite clever to exploit the rules perfectly. As per the rules, any driver who is ahead at the apex while heading into a corner can drive at the edge of the track, even if it means that his rival would be forced to go off the track.

This is exactly what happened between Verstappen and Norris. Since Verstappen was ahead at the apex, the stewards ruled that it was the Dutchman’s corner with Norris not being far enough alongside to pull off his overtake.

Even though the Red Bull driver also went wide off the track, the stewards penalized the #4 driver for overtaking Verstappen off the track and retaining that place.

oscar on the 5-sec penalty: i’ve seen the incident a bit and it was pretty harsh. i had a very similar incident yesterday in max’s position, and i was the one that got a penalty so i’m sure we’ll have some questions.

thank u oscar for also slowing down pic.twitter.com/VXlCGOtTdf

— ray (@ln4norris) October 20, 2024

At most, the stewards may have given Verstappen a warning for exceeding track limits and running Norris out of road. However, that was not the only time when the Red Bull driver seemingly got away with pushing Norris off the track.

Coulthard provides a solution to avoid further controversies

On the very first lap of the race, Verstappen pushed pole-sitter Norris off the track to overtake the Briton. As per Coulthard, this was another occasion when the Red Bull driver exploited the rules to his advantage.

As per the former driver, the stewards are lenient with any overtaking moves that take place on the first lap of the race, especially if they are in the first corner itself. Therefore, Coulthard believes the stewards did not take any action against Verstappen even though he gained a position over the McLaren driver, who ended up losing three places after the first corner.

In order to avoid such controversies in the future, Coulthard provided a solution on the podcast. “The only way to solve that is to have gravel on the exit of the first corner because no one is going to knowingly drive into the gravel”, he said.

Coulthard believes that drivers avoid making such overtaking moves in a race track like Monaco since there are barriers and no one would want to crash into them. If such controversial overtakes take place more often, then the FIA may indeed consider pondering over the rules again or make changes to some of the race tracks.