Lando Norris admits he still needs to find the right balance between being fair and aggressive in on-track battles.

Incidents between Norris and Max Verstappen at several races this season have come under scrutiny, with the Dutchman often gaining the upper hand in close wheel-to-wheel battles. While Norris benefited from Verstappen’s double penalty in Mexico, he admits he already had to change his approach based on his own penalty a week earlier at the Circuit of the Americas.

“I always fought fair,” Norris said. “This is who I am. This is who I am as a runner. This is the way I drive every day. Maybe sometimes I lost because I was too fair and not aggressive enough. And this is where I need to find a better balance.

“Those are the things, the changes that I said I needed to change from last weekend and over the course of this year, that when you race against these top guys, you learn things and you have to understand those balances better .attack, defense, risk management, aggression, all that kind of stuff.

“But for me, I don’t have to worry about them. In a way, it has nothing to do with me. I mean, I’ll do what I can. I will run fairly. If he doesn’t, things will happen the way they did. But I think he wants to race fairly. I hope he does. I think he also enjoys those moments when it’s a fair fight, but all I can do is keep doing what I’m doing. I feel like I’m doing a good job and we’ll see what happens.

Norris also says his opinion on what is right and what is wrong has evolved over the course of this season, following a collision with Verstappen in Austria that earned the championship leader a 10-second penalty .

“In Austria, no one should have received a penalty, I don’t think. Maybe some of my views are a little different now than they were back then. In Austria, I don’t think anyone should have received a penalty. Austin, I don’t think anyone should have received a penalty. Let’s just say we both did things wrong.

“I feel like I was made to do something wrong, and… the majority of people, the majority of drivers feel like it was the same thing. That’s why you’ve heard about some of the rule changes that might be made and that sort of thing. This is because there is a common consensus that what happened in the result I got last weekend was not correct.

“(In Mexico), I think, it was another level in both of those cases. I was in front of Max in the braking zone, after the apex. I avoid crashing. That’s the difference. I can’t speak for him, and maybe he will say something different.

“But I think it was a step too far between the two, and it was clear that the stewards agreed with that. So, I don’t see it as a victory or anything like that, but I instead hopes that Max recognizes that he has gone too far.