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Max Verstappen Had a Great Two-Word Response to Kyle Larson Saying He's the Better Driver

The NASCAR driver made a bold claim about Verstappen recently.

Josh Wilson

Max Verstappen, Formula One Driver for Red Bull Racing
Max Verstappen, Formula One Driver for Red Bull Racing / Eric Bolte-USA TODAY Sports

Kyle Larson has lit the match on an unsolvable debate. He recently claimed he was a better driver than Max Verstappen at anything outside of open-wheel racing.

“I know in my mind I am better than him as an all-around driver,” Larson said. “There’s no way (Verstappen) can get into a Sprint Car and win the Knoxville Nationals. There’s no way he can go win the Chili Bowl. There’s no way he can go win a Cup race at Bristol. There’s probably no way I can go win a Formula 1 race at Monaco, but I think I’d have a better shot at him just because of the car element."

Asked about Larson's claim on Thursday, he had just two coy words:

With a quick detour to another sport, let me put it this way. There is no undebatable answer to the question of whether LeBron James or Michael Jordan was the better basketball player. Even though they played in the same league, their presence in different eras that boasted unique meta playstyles makes the debate too complex to land anywhere in unison. That same issue exists in racing, except it's true even within eras, because motorsports is so diverse with different surfaces, tracks, car types and racing styles within different grids.

Weeks ago, Verstappen's "high road" answer to a similar question on Larson was quite balanced:

"I wouldn't be good in dirt. Maybe if I would practice? I don't know. Because I think at the end of the day, good racing driver picks up things quite quickly. I find like, you know, it all depends on what you grew up with as well. Like for me of course, probably Go Karting and F1, these things are more natural to me than racing on dirt, I have no clue how to do that at the moment."

In the clip, Verstappen goes on to leave it open-ended as far as his potential were he to commit to dirt racing.

The debate has gripped motorsports over the last few days, with Kevin Harvick taking Larsons's side, and Fernando Alonso using it as an opportunity to claim he's better in GTs than his F1 gridmate.

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Josh Wilson
JOSH WILSON

Josh Wilson is the news director of the Breaking and Trending News team at Sports Illustrated. Before joining SI in 2024, he worked for FanSided in a variety of roles, most recently as senior managing editor of the brand’s flagship site. He has also served as a general manager of Sportscasting, the sports arm of a start-up sports media company, where he oversaw the site’s editorial and business strategy. Wilson has a bachelor’s degree in mass communications from SUNY Cortland and a master’s in accountancy from the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. He loves a good nonfiction book and enjoys learning and practicing Polish. Wilson lives in Chicago but was raised in upstate New York. He spent most of his life in the Northeast and briefly lived in Poland, where he ate an unhealthy amount of pastries for six months.

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