Hinchcliffe sees mind games in Verstappen’s claim he could have closed on Norris

James Hinchcliffe saw calculated gamesmanship in Max Verstappen’s post-race suggestion that he could have closed further on Lando Norris if his grid penalty had not sent him to the back. On the F1 Nation podcast, Hinchcliffe said it was the sort of remark a driver should make to “get into the head of your competition”.

Verstappen started 21st after an engine-related penalty for exceeding his season’s power-unit component allocation and recovered to second behind race winner Norris.

Hinchcliffe compared Norris’s 14.602-second winning margin in 2026 with his 10-second São Paulo win in 2025. He recalled Norris saying on the 2025 cool-down lap that the earlier margin was not enough. Hinchcliffe suggested Verstappen would still ask whether the 2026 gap told the whole story; he said the willingness to pick apart what went wrong after such a drive was part of what made Verstappen a fierce competitor.