‘So that’s a track limit?’ Verstappen turns line judge as title fight tightens in Austin
Max Verstappen didn’t just win the United States Grand Prix. He moonlighted as an extra set of stewards’ eyes.
Previously unheard team radio from Austin captured the Red Bull driver flagging Lando Norris for a potential track-limits breach mid-race, a cheeky aside that summed up both Verstappen’s headspace and the razor’s-edge margins defining this title run-in.
Verstappen’s victory at Circuit of the Americas was his third in the last four rounds, a surge that’s dragged him back into the thick of the 2025 championship with five to go. He now trails Norris by 26 points, with Oscar Piastri a further 14 clear at the top. That’s the posture of a man counting everything — gaps, laps, and yes, the white lines.
Norris’s afternoon always had a subplot. He was on thin ice early, racking up three strikes for track limits while scrapping with Charles Leclerc for second. Under the current rules, three strikes trigger a black-and-white flag; the next one brings a five-second penalty. That’s the sword Norris had dangling above him from as early as Lap 10.
Red Bull were watching. On Lap 21, Verstappen’s race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase passed along the intel: Norris had reached three strikes and was on his final warning. No reaction from Verstappen that time. Ten laps later, there was.
As Norris locked up and skated wide at Turn 12, Lambiase hopped back on the radio to update Max on the McLaren’s moment — and got a deadpan reply.
“So that’s a track limit?” Verstappen asked, the tone halfway between curious and playful.
“Yeah. Thanks for that, Max!” came Lambiase’s amused answer, right before calling his driver into the pits.
Classic Verstappen: full tilt on pace, and still sharp enough to lob a reminder at Race Control via his own pit wall. It didn’t change the outcome for Norris, who kept his nose clean thereafter, but it underscored how aggressively Red Bull are prosecuting the margins as the pressure climbs.
Norris, for his part, was hardly thrilled with the letter of the law. In the post‑race press conference he called the current approach to track limits “one of the silliest rules” in F1, arguing that drivers are invited to race but punished when a wheel strays beyond the line in wheel‑to‑wheel combat.
He pointed to two hotspots — the blind crest at Turn 9 and the final sector — and admitted he’d put himself on the back foot early.
“I was on three strikes by Lap 10,” Norris said, adding that one of those came while he was trying to go the long way round and actually losing time to Leclerc. The wind at Turn 19 didn’t help, either. That meant a cautious endgame: no more rope to play with, no free passes over the paint, and one eye on the delta in case the stewards’ note turned into a time penalty.
The larger point is where this leaves the fight. McLaren arrived in Austin with both cars in the hunt; it left with Verstappen holding the momentum and executing the sort of immaculate, low‑drama Sunday that wins titles. Red Bull’s operational polish — and Verstappen’s habit of multitasking at 300km/h — feels like the counterpunch to McLaren’s raw speed.
Five races remain. Piastri still owns the high ground, Norris is the nearest threat, and Verstappen is the hunter with his teeth in the chase. In Texas, he didn’t just toe the line. He made sure everyone else did, too.
