David Coulthard believes Lando Norris and Max Verstappen’s friendship will survive this year, but suspects there will be further flashpoints between them.

This year’s championship fight has pitted two friends against each other for the title – a situation in which friendships can easily fall apart.

David Coulthard on whether Lando Norris and Max Verstappen can stay friends

An infamous case of a Formula 1 title tearing two friends apart is the childhood friendship between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg being destroyed by them teaming up at Mercedes as the Brackley-based squad became the dominant force in the sport.

The friendship didn’t last long as both attempted to beat the other to the title, with Hamilton winning in 2014 and ’15 before Rosberg struck back in ’16 and promptly retired from the sport.

This year, Verstappen and Norris haven’t been driving for the same team, but their friendship has also been tested as the two leading protagonists for the title.

With Norris gunning for Verstappen’s crown, it’s led the Dutch driver to show his aggressive side on track and, in Austria, the first clash between the pair resulted in Norris publicly calling for an apology from Verstappen – an apology which didn’t come.

But Verstappen’s clear desire to maintain their friendship meant the experienced frontrunner didn’t respond with anger to Norris’ calls and, by the following weekend, the McLaren man had backed down on chasing an apology.

Recent weeks have seen further flashpoints with Verstappen defending aggressively against Norris in the United States and Mexico – the battle in Austin resulted in a penalty for Norris, while Mexico went against Verstappen. The pair’s relationship may not be as close as it was at the start of the season, but neither has it spilled into acrimony, with Norris revealing that he and Verstappen have not spoken about their on-track disputes.

David Coulthard, speaking to PlanetF1.com at Red Bull’s Showrun in Galway, Ireland, last weekend, said he believes there’s enough strength and depth to the pair’s relationship that it should survive this season’s tempest.

“There’s no question that he’s been very close with Max, whilst things haven’t been competitive together on track,” he said when asked about how difficult it is for a friendship between rivals to survive.

“But, in many ways, I think they’ve got a big enough base of what they enjoy doing away from the racetrack that they’ll be fine.

“The fact that Max is Max, and the facts that Lando will have to react and explain or say what he liked and what he didn’t like – that’s the professional part of their relationship, and both of them should be at liberty to see what they feel.

“From our point of view, reporting on the sport, we don’t want them all going, ‘Hey, it’s my buddy, and we go and fight each other on the track, and then we go off on holiday together’. That’s not actually what we want.

“We want this sort of gladiatorial emotional roller coaster, and we want to see that it matters a lot – it matters to us as fans whether your driver or your team wins.

“So if Lando goes, ‘Ah, yeah, well, I finished second today. Max is the best driver’, we’d be like, ‘Lando, you’re brilliant, you’re quick, you’re just almost there’. So we want them to get their elbows out!”

But, in comparison to Hamilton and Rosberg’s more serious clashes, Norris and Verstappen’s flashpoints have not reached the vitriol to test their friendship in quite the same way – Austria being the most serious of the handful.

Coulthard acknowledged this as being a factor saying: “There hasn’t been a lot, but there will be more.”

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David Coulthard: Things change when his success is your failure

The fact Verstappen and Norris are racing for different teams also plays a part, Coulthard explained, with a relationship as teammates in a competitive car more likely to be damaging.

“It’s a bit like Carlos [Sainz] and Lando when they were teammates,” Coulthard said as he began to explain why that’s the case.

“Well, it’s easy to be buddies when you don’t have a competitive car, because then the goal is, ‘How do we make this car a winning car?’

“The minute you have a car where his success is your failure and your success is his failure, that changes everything. You sense it. Maybe not so much in the debrief because you sit this far away from your teammate and his engineer, and everything you’re saying is beamed back to the factory.

“The room is so intimate, that everyone can hear what’s been said. No secrets in the debrief, the only secrets are the ones you keep in your head, so when you’ve got that situation where you’re on pole and your teammate is second, you know what his strategy is because you’ve discussed it together.

“So Lando doesn’t know what Max’s strategy is – they can surmise and guess but, when it’s your teammate and you know he’s stopping on Lap 19, and you’ve got to stop a lap later because he’s got the first call because he’s on pole, you know you’re already compromised.

“You can’t undercut because, if you undercut, then the other driver will go, ‘Well, I’m going to undercut’, and then you end up stopping on Lap 5 because you’re trying to undercut, and then you lose sight of the bigger battle.

“So it’s a really, really complex thing, having two drivers on the same team when they both have a chance of winning. That’s when the friendship turns to s**t.”

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