2016 Formula 1 World Champion Nico Rosberg believes Lando Norris needs to push for a “new limit” in the regulations to aid his battles with Max Verstappen in 2025.
The pair clashed many times on the track last term, as the two came together in Austria with Norris forced to retire after sustaining too much damage to his McLaren.
Controversial incidents in the United States and Mexico followed, with each collision benefiting Verstappen en route to him retaining the Drivers’ title in Las Vegas.
Norris is considered the favourite for the crown in 2025 amid McLaren’s Constructors’ win, but Rosberg has highlighted Verstappen has an advantage in one vital area.
“It’s just so hard to be friends in a situation like that,” Rosberg said on last month’s Sky F1 podcast.
“Especially when you have a rival like Max Verstappen, who is a master of maximizing the grey area.
“He goes beyond the limit but just within; actually, he’s been doing above now a couple of times.
“We saw him get a couple of penalties because he’s always on the cutting edge.
“And he’s such a fierce wheel-to-wheel racer, and I think it’s fair to say that Lando lost pretty much every single wheel-wheel-moment that they went together.
“The large majority of wheel-to-wheel racing, Verstappen comes out on top.”
However, Rosberg senses that there are things that Norris can do to combat Verstappen’s hardened stance in wheel-to-wheel combat.
“That’s something where Lando still needs to find his way, whether it’s tightening up the regulations on a political front, with the wheel-to-wheel racing regulations,
because Max — there’s some stuff that Max does which is not right,” he added.
Rosberg: FIA needs to stop Verstappen’s ‘extreme’ lunges
Rosberg knows all too well about battling a multiple World Champion, as the German driver famously duelled with Lewis Hamilton many times whilst at Mercedes.
He even faced a young Verstappen in 2016 which included a ding-dong battle at Silverstone as the Dutchman came out on top thanks to a 10-second time penalty for the Mercedes driver.
But Rosberg does not agree with the Red Bull driver’s tactics, adding: “At some point, you cannot just lunge and expect the other guy to move out of the way every time; there needs to be a limit that’s set,” he added.
“A new limit, I’d say, because at the moment, the regulations just allow him to do these lunges, and the other guy has to move out of the way.
“As long as Max stays on the track, then he’s good, that’s just too extreme.
“So maybe Lando needs to be pushing on that front a little bit, just to tighten things up.”
Whilst forcing a regulation change from the FIA might be not as straightforward as suggested by the ex-Silver Arrows driver, he does have a simpler solution.
“He needs to analyze every single wheel-to-wheel battle that Max Verstappen has been in throughout the last three years, every single one,” Rosberg explained.
“The team needs to prepare the snippets of videos and he needs to study them and study them and study them to understand what could he do better tactically to beat Max in those situations.”
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