Max Verstappen has insisted he would tell Red Bull chiefs to “shut up” if they imposed the same rules McLaren enforced on Lando Norris last season.
The Dutchman won his fourth consecutive Drivers’ Championship this year ahead of second-place Norris.
Verstappen built an unassailable lead during the early stages of the F1 season as he won seven of the first 10 races.
And despite suffering a downturn in fortunes as the season wore on, he eventually won the title by 63 points.
McLaren have internal rules, known as the Papaya Rules, which allow their drivers to race each other as long as it’s fair and clean.
But at the Italian Grand Prix at the start of September, Norris was stunned by an overtaking move from his team-mate Oscar Piastri and claimed both drivers could have been out of the race if he had braked a little later. And Verstappen thinks the rules are a “nonsense”.
During an interview with Viaplay this week, the 27-year-old explained “This is another nonsense quote. Papaya Rules - that’s totally useless to me.
“If I heard that from the engineer I’d tell him to just shut up immediately. What kind of nonsense is this.
You’re allowed to race, it’s fine. You know they could have solved this in a way easier and better way.”
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella cleared up what the Papaya Rules mean as he revealed in mid-September:
“The Papaya Rules only have to do with racing with no risks, no contact between the two McLarens and respectfully. That’s it.
“It’s just a quick way to remind our drivers, ‘Guys, don’t take too much risk in fighting each other.’”
But he then decided to back Norris as he later explained to the BBC: “We [will] bias our support to Lando but we want to do it without too much compromise on our principles.
“Our principles are that the team interest always comes first. Sportsmanship for us is important in the overall way we go racing. And then we want to be fair to both drivers.
“What we don't want to see anymore is a situation like in Monza in which we enter a chicane P1/P2 and we exit P1/P3, because that is a detriment to the team.
“The team interests come first and these are the situations that above all we need to fix because as a matter of fact, the way we entered the race in Monza left the door open for this situation.”
