What you can’t do is offer a title rival like Max Verstappen the freedom of Texas and expect to beat him to the most fiercely contested prize in motor racing. That is what Lando Norris did in the US Grand Prix.
Verstappen needs no second invitation. He is adept at threading his rampaging Red Bull through the eye of a needle with sledgehammer force, let alone blast down a hole he should never have been afforded.
This was always going to be the latest severe test of Norris’s mettle, with him starting on pole and Verstappen alongside him on the grid. He flunked it to finish fourth, despite harrying Verstappen through the final, thrilling exchanges. The Dutchman, in a slower car, drove like a god to defend third place.
It was an astonishing conclusion. Emerging from the pits six seconds behind Verstappen, Norris closed to within a second of the championship leader with 12 laps to go. They jousted front-wing to back, on and on.
But, even when Norris thought he had made the pivotal move stick, at Turn 12 four laps from the end, the stewards denied him his moment of satisfaction, imposing a five-second penalty that relegated him a place (from fourth to third). He argued he led at the apex — the stewards disagreed — but he then overtook Verstappen, whose elbows were sharpened at the horizontal, the wrong side of the white lines.
The race was won in style by Charles Leclerc in a Ferrari one-two with Carlos Sainz. The upshot is that Norris falls 57 points back from Verstappen with five rounds remaining. The maths can only give Norris a headache.
A late jewel of a contest, yes, but it all went back to how they fared on the steepling road into the first corner. Norris, who has a record of timidity off the line, was quick to react. His initial getaway was Bolt-esque. He commanded the track on the early ascent but was on the brakes too early, allowing Verstappen through via the only conceivable route — on the left, on the inside.
Now, Verstappen is not known to be a shrinking violet. Pleasant off track, on it he’d mug his granny. Norris, to put it mildly, could hardly be unaware of this side of his pal’s DNA.
Afterwards, Norris was magnanimous enough to admit of his caution: ‘I drove like a muppet.’ But in the heat of battle, he nevertheless complained over the radio.
‘He clearly pushed me off,’ Norris did protest too much. ‘He had no intention of making the corner. He had to go off the track as well. I had to avoid crashing into him.’
Zak Brown, Norris’s McLaren boss, contended that Verstappen had ‘divebombed’ his man. He would do.
But I am afraid not even jingoism can hide the fact Verstappen simply exploited a legitimate chance. The stewards did not even note the incident.
By turn two of lap one of 56, Norris was lying fourth.
Echoes of past races came to mind. On only one occasion when the Briton has started on pole, in seven grands prix and one sprint, has he completed the opening lap in front. The conversion rate is not title-winning material.
Norris, it should be said, has driven very well this season, with speed and skill, but he has blinked at crunch moments.
In Saturday’s shortened race, he locked up at the death to fall from second place to third. The three weeks of inaction since the previous round in Singapore were what Norris least needed.
And his car, with a modified rear wing that does not sail as close to legality as its more flexible predecessor, may also be less strong than it has been in the last four months. It’s going to be tough for Lando from here. He is not out of it, though, heading to Mexico City’s thin air this Sunday.
It was, meanwhile, a weekend to forget for the last Briton to claim the world title, Lewis Hamilton.
He has won a record five times in Austin, and six in all in America, the country in which he now lives. But he started the sprint in seventh, finished it sixth, qualified 19th, and was then the first man back into the paddock, his car in the gravel. ‘Sorry, guys,’ he said.
