Formula One World champion Lando Norris said he had been amused by the reaction to his declaring the new 2026 cars fun to drive after Red Bull rival Max Verstappen stated the opposite.<\/p>\n
Four times world champion Verstappen told reporters during pre-season testing in Bahrain last week that his car, the first of a new engine era for the sport, was like \u201cFormula E on steroids\u201d and not a lot of fun.<\/p>\n
McLaren\u2019s Norris, who ended Verstappen\u2019s run of four titles in a row last year, had taken a contrary stance and suggested the Dutch driver could \u201cgo and find something else to do\u201d if he was not happy.<\/p>\n
The rivals\u2019 comments fuelled an already lively online debate about what racing will be like this season and how fans and drivers might react<\/p>\n
\u201cI just didn\u2019t want to come out to the media and complain to everyone on the first weekend back,\u201d Norris told reporters during testing on Thursday.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been quite an amusing week seeing the reactions \u2026 it\u2019s certainly made a lot of people comment and say a lot of things which has been pretty funny. I just wanted to see everyone\u2019s reaction.\u201d<\/p>\n
Norris accepted that the new cars were very different to last year and \u201cabsolutely not\u201d as enjoyable.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs it still a challenge and good fun out there? Yeah,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m certainly not going to change my job for anything else.<\/p>\n
\u201cI still have fun and it\u2019s still the job that I love to do. But it\u2019s certainly very different.\u201d<\/p>\n
Verstappen had suggested Norris was in a small pop-up tent, compared to the rest under a bigger canvas, when asked if there were two camps of opinion.<\/p>\n
The Briton said he actually agreed with Verstappen on a lot of things.<\/p>\n
\u201cProbably most of the comments I agree with, but it\u2019s not that I don\u2019t have fun out there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The season starts in Melbourne on March 8.<\/p>\n
–Reuters–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":13674,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"news-type":[20],"class_list":["post-23987","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-sport","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"McLaren\u2019s Norris, who ended Verstappen\u2019s run of four titles in a row last year,.","published_date":null,"news_description":"McLaren\u2019s Norris, who ended Verstappen\u2019s run of four titles in a row last year,.","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/23987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/23987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26802,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/23987\/revisions\/26802"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=23987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}