Las Vegas served up neon, nerves and a little needle. An untelevised slice of team radio from the grid has surfaced, catching Lando Norris accusing Max Verstappen of “taking the p*ss” with the gaps on the formation lap — moments before the McLaren swept across to defend and then skated wide at Turn 1, handing the lead to the Red Bull.
It was classic pre-start brinkmanship in tricky conditions. With temperatures down and rear tyres reluctant to wake up, race control had told drivers to crank out up to five burnouts at the end of the formation lap. Verstappen obliged, aggressively, all five of them. Norris managed three, none too wild, because he was busy policing the space ahead and the Red Bull looming behind.
“Yeah, he’s taking the p*ss with how big of a gap he’s leaving. It’s way over the allowed allowance,” Norris told McLaren as they rolled to the grid, pushing again: “You can’t do this. It’s 10 car lengths, no?” The wrinkle: that 10-car-length rule applies under the Safety Car. On formation laps, the wording is softer — “kept as tight as possible” — which gives drivers room to, well, interpret.
Verstappen interpreted it like a four-time world champion chasing a title should. He dialled in the tyre temp, launched better, then watched as Norris pinched right to close the door, ended up on the dust and at too sharp an angle, and slid wide. Verstappen was gone. Gianpiero Lambiase, back on the podium with his driver for the first time since Qatar 2023, came over the radio with the sort of pat on the back he saves for big days: “Good job, Max. You kept it calm. Kept your head.”
The head game mattered as much as the horsepower. Verstappen’s sixth win of 2025 tightened the title fight and, after Norris’s post-race disqualification for excessive skid-block wear — McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri suffered the same fate — the gap sits at 24 points with two rounds to go in Qatar and Abu Dhabi, per the current standings. Norris had crossed the line second, but the stewards’ ruling stripped those points and turned a contained setback into a real sting.
None of this will surprise anyone who’s watched Verstappen operate at the start of a Grand Prix. He’s ruthless in the first 500 meters and unapologetic about shaping the battle before the lights even go out. Here, he used the “tight as possible” clause to his advantage, hit the burnouts hard, and forced Norris to make a decision at the worst possible moment: defend aggressively from a colder rear axle, or risk the slipstream. Norris chose the former, and paid for it by Turn 1.
For McLaren, the bigger frustration isn’t the mind games; it’s the squandered haul. Strip away the DSQ and the story is of a title leader rattled just enough at the start to blink. Add the DSQ, and it becomes a night they’ll want to forget quickly. The MCL38 has been a potent tool this season, and Norris has typically been cool under pressure, but Las Vegas was a reminder that when Verstappen smells weakness — or opportunity — he doesn’t hesitate.
There’s no grand scandal here about rules being broken on the way to the grid. Drivers stretch elastic on formation laps all the time; some are better at knowing where it snaps. The lesson for Norris isn’t in the radio message, it’s in what followed. He let the gap game into his head at exactly the moment he needed to focus on making his own start perfect.
Two to go now. Lusail’s long run to Turn 1 and Yas Marina’s drag to the chicane have a habit of amplifying launch execution. If Norris locks in the next two formation laps — keeps the burnouts up, the chatter down and the lines clean — he still holds the advantage. If he gets drawn into another fencing match before the lights, Verstappen and Lambiase will take that gift and run all the way to the flag. Small games win big titles. Las Vegas just put that in neon.
