For a few months in F1 2024, it looked as though Max Verstappen could lose his grasp on the World Drivers’ Championship to McLaren rival Lando Norris — only for Norris to lose out through a series of mistakes.

Nico Rosberg — a man who knows a thing or two about battling extremely hard against someone you consider to be your friend, has a little advice he’d like to pass along to Norris: Find a new limit.

Lando Norris needs to ‘find a new limit’ against Max Verstappen

Time and again throughout the F1 2024 season, Norris came tantalizingly close to snatching a World Championship from Verstappen.

Beginning with his first win in Miami, Norris knew a changing of the guard could be possible if only he could remain consistent, defend himself on track and take advantage of Red Bull’s dismal performance.

But that didn’t happen.

Norris seemed regularly surprised at the hard battles being waged against him by the Dutch driver; the two drivers were friendly off the track, after all, and it came as quite a surprise to Norris that a friend wouldn’t hesitate to run him off track for a position.

Despite everything, Norris’ impressive performances have seen many pundits pick him as a favorite for the F1 2025 title — if only he can reign in some of his more troublesome slip-ups against his friend.

Sky F1 pundit Nico Rosberg knows all about that frustration, and he has some advice for Norris about racing against a friend.

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In the early to mid-2010s, Nico Rosberg joined Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes.

The two men were childhood friends who soon grew frustrated with one another as it became clear that they were competing in the most dominant car, and that only one of them could win the championship in a year.

In that kind of atmosphere, it can be easy to let conflicted emotions get the better of you.

“It’s just so hard to be friends in a situation like that,” Rosberg said on a December 10 episode of the Sky F1 podcast, “especially when you have a rival like Max Verstappen, who is a master of maximizing the gray 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.”

If Norris wants to win a title in F1 2025, Rosberg argues, then he’ll need to find a way to beat Verstappen in those close battles — and the 2016 Champion has some suggestions.

“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 said.

“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.

“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 that’s just too extreme. So maybe Lando needs to be pushing on that front a little bit, just to tighten things up.”

But on top of that, there are other ways to prepare for the season.

Rosberg argued that Norris could “just analyze, prepare the hell out of it.

“He needs to analyze every single wheel-to-wheel battle that Max Verstappen has been in throughout the last three years, every single one.

“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.”

Rosberg’s comments come after Zak Brown, the McLaren chief executive, claimed Norris now “knows exactly how to deal with Max” going forward.

According to Speedweek, he said: “I think Lando has learned how to fight against Max.

‘Because Max has been very open about how he drives. If you try to overtake him on the outside, he won’t let you.

“But Lando gave him a great fight in Mexico and also made sure that there was no clash between the two of them. We were fighting for the Constructors‘ title and we couldn’t afford to be too aggressive.

“So Lando did the right thing and I think he knows exactly how to deal with Max on the track.

“I am convinced that he will perform differently next year.”

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