Winning his fourth World title ahead of Lando Norris, Max Verstappen has revealed he offered the Briton a seat at Red Bull because if “you want to win, you come here”.

Verstappen wrapped up his fourth successive Drivers’ Championship title in Las Vegas on Saturday night, the Red Bull driver racing out to an unassailable 63-point lead over Norris.

Max Verstappen ‘invited’ Lando Norris to join Red Bull

The Dutchman labelled it a “challenging” championship given Red Bull’s off and on-track issues which coupled with McLaren’s emergence as the fastest car on the track.

Verstappen and Norris’ rivalry exploded at the Austrian Grand Prix where they went wheel-to-wheel for the victory, before a coming together resulted in Norris retiring from the race while Verstappen finished P5.

One race later in Silverstone, the Red Bull driver recorded his biggest advantage at 84 points before victories for Norris in the Netherlands and Singapore allowed him to pull that back to 44 points in Brazil’s Sprint race.

But 24 hours later the title race was over bar the shouting as Verstappen raced to a dominant win in a wet Brazilian Grand Prix while Norris floundered, two mistakes leaving him down in sixth place.

Verstappen clinched the title in Las Vegas, P5 on the night while Norris was sixth.

Norris was quickly up alongside the Red Bull driver on the track with a thumbs up to congratulate him while Verstappen also had a few words for his friend after a tension-fraught few months with clashes in Austin and Mexico.

“Lando, I know him, of course, for a long time already,” he told the media including PlanetF1.com. “To race a friend of yours to the title is always a little bit different. But I think we have a lot of respect for each other. And yeah, well, I’m sure that we’ll have many more battles to come.”

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Those battles, Verstappen revealed, could’ve been as team-mates as in years gone by he offered the Briton Sergio Perez’s Red Bull race seat.

“I’ve spent,” he told the official F1 YouTube channel, “quite a lot of moments with Lando before so when I was already winning and he wasn’t. I always told him, ‘Your time will come. Stick to the process, I think you’re in a good team environment.

“I happily also invited him also to be my team-mate at the time and in ‘If you want to win, you can come here as well.’”

Norris chose to stick with McLaren, extending his contract at the beginning of this year, and Verstappen stayed at Red Bull.

“But of course, I’m happy for him,” Verstappen added. “He had a great season, maybe not everything went his way this year, but that’s just part of the road that you’re on.

“You make mistakes, you learn from it. It’s about how you bounce back from it.

“We are friends now, we are not best friends, it’s not like I call him day to day. Both of us have our own best friends, that’s how you grow up, right?

“But we are friends. I have a lot of respect for him and of course the media sometimes they ask some questions with a bit of a silly question and then you know you give an answer because you’re being pressured, it’s a championship fight, I find it a bit unfair.”

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