Norris owns Las Vegas start blunder as disqualification turns damage into disaster
Lando Norris didn’t sugarcoat it. “Pretty embarrassing,” he said of his opening move in Las Vegas — a lunge to the inside, on the dustier half of the Strip, that handed Max Verstappen the lead before they’d even settled into Turn 1. He braked late, ran deep, and the Red Bull was gone. That part he could live with. What came next stung far more.
Norris and McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri were both thrown out of the results after the flag for excessive plank wear, scrubbing a hard-fought P2 on the road into nothing and turning a bad start into a bruising night. Verstappen, meanwhile, banked another win and tightened the championship chase just when it looked like Norris had room to breathe.
The sequence was born on the formation lap. Verstappen loitered, then rattled off a string of burnouts before forming up — five in total to Norris’s three — priming the Red Bull’s rears for a cold desert launch. It was savvy, legal, and it worked. With better initial bite off the line, Verstappen forced Norris to make a choice into Turn 1: hang it around the grippier outside, or slice to the inside and hope the marbles would hold. Norris chose the latter. Vegas chose violence.
“You’ve got to be punchy into Turn 1,” he said afterwards. “I was just a bit too punchy and that cost me, so that’s the way it is sometimes.” Later, to Sky Sports F1, he was harsher: “Pretty embarrassing. I need to learn from Turn 1 and try to do a better job than I’ve been doing recently.”
There was no sass in the delivery, just a driver who knows the margin’s thin and the stakes are high. He’d won in Brazil, but even there Norris felt the tempo was tilting. “We weren’t quick enough in Brazil relative to what Max was. They seem very good. Max is doing a very good job and the Red Bull car seems very quick and they are beating us. I just hate getting beat, simple as that.”
The disqualification — a plank wear breach that also snared Piastri — was the gut punch. It wiped out McLaren’s evening and, crucially, gave Verstappen clean air in the points race. The title picture is still Norris’s to control, but the frame tightened. With two rounds to go, he remains out front, yet the gap is now fine enough that one more messy start or procedural misstep could flip the whole thing on its head.
And for all the noise about Max’s formation lap tactics, this wasn’t gamesmanship for its own sake. On a frigid Vegas night, tyre temps weren’t a detail, they were the whole plot. Verstappen’s extra burnouts found heat where Norris couldn’t. Multiply that by a low-grip inside line and you’ve got the story of Turn 1 in one sentence.
What should worry McLaren more than the optics is the trend. Red Bull looked increasingly at ease as the Vegas race stretched out. Verstappen turned the screw on pace, especially when the track rubbed in and management came to the fore. Norris could hang, but not bend the race to his will. Add in the DSQ, and it was a sobering reminder: the ceiling’s high at Woking, but the floor — literally — has to stay legal.
The next stop is Lusail, where the Sprint adds a second front row to the weekend’s risk/reward equation. The math is clear enough: outscore both Verstappen and Piastri by two points across the event and Norris seals his first Formula 1 title with a round to spare. Simple in theory, treacherous in practice. Lusail’s fast, punishing, and allergic to half-measures; it’s not the place to be tentative into Turn 1. Equally, it’s not the place to bleed points on preventable details.
No one inside McLaren will need reminding. They’ve been superb this season at executing under pressure and responding when they’ve been clipped. Vegas, though, felt like two hits at once: an opening-corner gamble that didn’t pay and a technical breach that simply can’t repeat in a run-in like this.
As for Verstappen, he did what Verstappen does — took a sliver of opportunity and turned it into a race he controlled. He didn’t need to win the mind games in Vegas; he only needed to win the launch. The rest followed.
So the Strip leaves us with a sharper title fight than the neon suggested on Thursday. Norris is still the favourite, just not by nearly as much as he looked before the lights went out. He’s got the pace to finish the job. Now he needs the start, the discipline, and a clean plank to match.
