Norris bristles at Turn 1 squeeze but relishes ‘nerve‑racking’ Monza fight as Verstappen bags win No.3 of 2025
Max Verstappen and Lando Norris served up the kind of Monza opening lap you watch through your fingers. Two heavyweights sprinting to the Rettifilo, Verstappen edging right to cover, Norris refusing to back out until he ran out of real estate and dipped wheels into the grass. A chicane cut. A radio blast. And then, just as quickly, a reset.
Verstappen, who’d edged pole by 0.077s, kept McLaren’s lead-out honest off the line and defended the inside. Norris, squeezed, took to the greenery to avoid contact, then chased Max into Turn 1 where the Red Bull cut the chicane to hang onto P1. “What’s this idiot doing?” came Norris’s crackle over the radio. “He’s put me in the grass and then he’s just cut the corner.”
Race Control noted it. Red Bull didn’t wait for the verdict. Gianpiero Lambiase got in the ear, Verstappen handed the place back at the end of Lap 1, and four laps later the championship’s blunt instrument was back through for good. It was Verstappen’s third grand prix victory of the 2025 season, with Norris shadowing him home in second.
For the stewards, the give-back was enough. For Norris, it was a matter of where the line sits in a title fight that’s fast becoming habitually elbows-out.
“I expect it to be tough, on the limit,” Norris said later, outwardly calm but still chewing on the details. “I don’t think you can push people into the dirt. He knew I was alongside from the very beginning, I had the better run. You can call it racing in the end, but you can’t just push people off the track.”
That first lap set the tone — feisty, precise, fraught. The pair went side by side again soon after, Verstappen sweeping around the outside into Turn 1 in a move Norris called “nerve‑rackingly close.” It was the kind of pass that makes the paddock go quiet for a beat. Norris, on the inside, had the worse angle and the narrower margin for error. In his words, Verstappen “can afford to be a lot more on the edge and aggressive than I can. I can’t afford to lose a front wing.”
This is the calculus of 2025: Verstappen’s instinct to impose himself at the start versus McLaren’s need to keep both cars in the fight. Norris took the risks he felt he needed. He just didn’t quite have the pace to make them stick as the race unfolded.
To Verstappen, it was “fun” but busy — a lap one tangle with track limits, a mirror full of orange and papaya, and the added visual clutter of Oscar Piastri and Charles Leclerc scrapping in the pack as the field sorted itself out. “It took two, three laps to settle in a bit,” he said. From there, the Red Bull did what the Red Bull does when it’s in phase: it controlled.
The flashpoint, inevitably, was the grass. We’ve seen it before at Monza — positions covered with millimetre-precision and rival cars tiptoeing across the threshold of what’s legal. Norris’s view was clear enough: tough is fine; tough plus lawn is a step too far. The officials, by allowing a give-back to wipe the slate clean, signalled they saw it as hard racing tidied by restitution.
Norris, for his part, didn’t let the emotion of the first-lap radio carry into the press room. “Close and fun,” he called it. “Enjoyable.” He enjoys these fights — you can hear it in his cadence when he describes the braking duel into Turn 1 and the adrenaline that lingers after. And he knows what they demand. He also knows that in this phase of the season, there’s a balance to strike between audacity and attrition.
If there’s a looming question, it’s whether stewarding in 2025 will keep treating first-lap lunges and squeezes as self-policing as long as positions are returned. Drivers talk about “the rules of engagement” because they want consistency they can bank their moves on. Verstappen found the edge, crossed it with a shortcut, and then paid it back promptly. Within that framework, he ticked the boxes.
None of it changes the headline: Verstappen on top again, McLaren close, the rivalry intact. Norris felt he had the better launch. Verstappen found the decisive move soon after. And Monza got what it loves — leaders at full tilt, no quarter asked, very little given.
It won’t be the last time these two argue over the width of a car and the definition of “space.” The next one might not be settled with a simple position swap. For now, it’s another marker laid down by the reigning benchmark, and another reminder that if you want to beat him, you’ll have to do it in the same fierce, narrow places where he’s made a career of breaking resistance.
