Miami showed Verstappen exploiting F1 rules to max – again

Mark Hughes

Max Verstappen preserved his lead at the start of the Miami GP by knowing the letter of the F1 law – probably costing Lando Norris the win

Max Verstappen Red Bull 2025 Miami GP

Verstappen puts it all on the line in bid to reach the apex first

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Mark Hughes

Max Verstappen’s clash with Lando Norris at Turn 2 a few seconds into Sunday’s Miami Grand Prix was all about the revised 2025 version of the driving standards guidelines as agreed by the drivers pre-season. These are what the stewards are guided by.

Specifically, in this case, the part which states that so long as the defending driver has their front axle ahead of the mirror of the attacking car on the outside, then the defending driver is no longer required to leave a car’s width of survival space as they exit the turn. In the case of Oscar Piastri vs Verstappen in the first corner at Jeddah, Piastri exercised that same right and Verstappen took to the run-off to avoid contact. The difference there was that the layout of the track allowed Verstappen to rejoin ahead. Hence the penalty when he didn’t give the place back.

At Turn 2 Miami the layout of the track meant the run-off narrowed to a point, with a wall on the outside, forcing Norris to back off and losing him many places. There is no route from that particular run-off to rejoin ahead by missing part of the corner, because the track turns away. Unlike at Jeddah Turn 1, the run-off in this case is the long way round.

3 Max Verstappen Red Bull 2025 Miami GP

Verstappen made sure he got to the T2 apex first

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Verstappen wasn’t obliged to leave any space on the outside for Lando Norris. So he didn’t. Norris in the anger of the moment radioed, “He forced me off. What am I meant to do, just drive into the wall or something? I was legally alongside… It’s common sense there. If I hadn’t backed off I’d be into the wall and over the fence.” The stewards judged that he wasn’t actually quite alongside, that his mirror was not alongside Verstappen’s front axle. Hence no penalty.

Going in-car with Verstappen and listening to the engine note, it appears that he deliberately over-commits to getting to that apex, because once he is there, marginally ahead, he comes a long way off the gas for pretty much the rest of the corner. Because he has to. To ensure he got to the apex first, he’s gone in too fast to make the corner in the conventional way. They bang front wheels as he takes up what is now – under the 2025 version of the regulations – his right to the corner, Norris’ steering wheel almost wrenched from his hands in the impact. Despite having his momentum checked by this, Verstappen still cannot avoid the exit kerb, grounding out the floor as he scrabbles over it.

From the archive

Rewinding from there, Norris had got a run on the Red Bull because Verstappen had locked up into Turn 1 and ran wide on the exit, getting onto the kerbs and losing traction, allowing Norris to get himself almost fully alongside into T2. That initial wheel-locking mistake of Verstappen quite probably lost Norris the race, handing it instead to his Australian team mate Oscar Piastri.

The driving rules were different in 2018 but in Shanghai Verstappen found himself the victim of a “bit of oversteer” from the driver he was trying to pass around the outside: Lewis Hamilton. Taking to the run-off area in reaction, also at a place where that was the long way round, lost Verstappen that race. Handing it instead to his Australian team mate Daniel Ricciardo. The strange rhymes of history again. But Miami wasn’t really a repeat.

In both cases it was hard, not quite dirty, but certainly ruthless. In 2018 the Red Bulls of Verstappen and Ricciardo had benefitted from the timing of a safety car to get onto new tyres, with Hamilton (and the two Ferraris of Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Räikkönen) on much older rubber and their previous big gap ahead of the Red Bulls wiped. Hamilton and the Ferraris were sitting ducks waiting to be picked off. As he caught Hamilton, all Verstappen needed to do was wait for the DRS zone down the long back straight to make an easy pass into the hairpin. But before they got there, Hamilton played him, left a tempting gap around the outside of the fast Turn 7, not a conventional passing place. As Verstappen went for it and got partly alongside, Hamilton had ‘a bit of oversteer’, his car taking up the track width Verstappen had planned on using, forcing him onto the run-off. Was the oversteer induced? Could’ve been. There was plausible deniability there.

Lewis Hamilton Mercedes 2018 Chinese GP

Miami ’25 had shades of Shanghai ’18

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At Miami, Verstappen under the previous regulations might have used that same plausible deniability to have ‘had a bit of oversteer’, as he likely wouldn’t have gone into the turn so fast that he was always going to run wide and Norris would have been more fully alongside and their race would’ve continued through the corner (probably not without controversy). But now, the race is to the apex. Which makes for an unnatural set of choices for both drivers in this situation. The pattern of racing will change and Miami Turn 2 last Sunday was probably the first explicit example of that.

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