Jenson Button Puts Christian Horner in Place About Norris vs Verstappen Battle

Jenson Button Puts Christian Horner in Place About Norris vs Verstappen Battle

One-time F1 World Champion Jenson Button believes that better regulations are needed for the sport after Lando Norris and Max Verstappen’s penalty drama during the United States Grand Prix this past weekend.

The top two in the championship were fighting for third place in the final stages of the race when Norris tried a move around the outside into turn 12, only for Verstappen to hold the inside line and push his rival wide. The two cars would run off-track with Norris emerging in front and staying there until the chequered flag, only to lose his place on the podium due to a five-second time penalty handed by the stewards under the ruling that he ran off-track and gained an advantage.

Button, the 2009 World Champion, was part of the post-race debrief for Sky Sports F1 when Red Bull team principal Christian Horner joined as a guest to discuss how the race had gone for his team, where the lap 52 moment was unsurprisingly brought up.

Horner explained that the outcome of the controversy was as expected according to the current regulations applied to F1, where Norris completed his overtake off the track while the one to reach the apex first was Verstappen, therefore giving the advantage of the corner to the defending Dutchman. However, Button challenged Horner on his opinion, claiming that Verstappen was taking advantage of the way the regulations are written.

He said: “It’s all about who’s in front at the apex and Max was in front. But is that because he let off the brake at the apex? It seems that your driver is very good at understanding the regulations, and it’s more the problem that we need to have better regulations for what is okay and what isn’t. We saw it with many fights on track at that corner.

Guys overtaking, putting it down the inside, just driving the other guy off of the track. We need a rule that you cannot push another completely off the track, and then I think we would have some better racing, so we wouldn’t have to keep talking about this