George Russell has warned Max Verstappen that every other driver on the F1 grid wants to firm up the rules over unfair manoeuvres.
Verstappen has clashed with world championship title rival Lando Norris in both of the last two races. In the United States Grand Prix two weeks ago, Norris was handed a five-second penalty after overtaking Verstappen off the track.
But the Red Bull man was handed a 20-second penalty after the stewards took a dim view of his efforts to defend against Norris in Sunday's Mexican Grand Prix. Russell has been pushing for F1 to firm up its guidelines around overtaking.
The Mercedes star serves as a director for the Grand Prix Drivers Association. And he has now warned that virtually the entire grid is on Norris' side in his recent battles with Verstappen.
"I think the stewards are totally on board with what needs to change," Russell said. "Our view is, I think the biggest discussion is they wanted to wait until 2025, so it's something consistent through this year.
"I would say 19 out of 20 drivers said, 'well, if it's incorrect, make the change today'. And I'm glad to see those incidents were punished and I suspect moving forward in Brazil what we saw today and what we saw last week you won't be able to get away with.
"You presume [it should be easy to change if everyone agrees], but it sometimes seems more difficult than it has to be when things have to get approved and we've got to go to a vote app. But as I said, 19 out of 20, we're all aligned on where it needs to be.
"At the moment you're seeing a number of manoeuvres that are just...it's getting beyond entertaining or beyond sporting, it's just almost unfair to a point now. You can argue the first one was maybe 60-40. The last one, I've not seen anything like that since probably Brazil [2021]."
Norris had tried to get past Verstappen at Turn 4 on Sunday but was forced wide by the Red Bull, cutting across the grass in the process, and both drivers had an off-track moment into Turn 8, which subsequently allowed Charles Leclerc to sweep past them both.
Verstappen received a 10-second time penalty for the first incident and a few laps later it was announced that the Dutchman would also be hit with another 10-second time penalty. But the Red Bull star was keen to move on from the punishments.
“At the end of the day, if you agree with it or not, it doesn’t matter because the penalties are given. That was also honestly not my biggest problem of the race, my biggest problem was that we just had no pace," he said.
"Just struggling a lot on the tyres, couldn’t really attack, and I couldn’t follow Ferrari and McLaren. I mean I knew that was going to be tough. It never felt great so, yeah, I knew that it was going to be very difficult to keep them behind.”
