Norris claims vital Hungarian GP win to intensify title battle

Had Piastri won at the Hungaroring, Norris would have been left to dwell during F1’s summer break on a gaping 23-point deficit in the McLaren drivers’ increasingly exclusive World Championship duel. Instead, an unlikely victory in a race that appeared to have slipped away from him leaves the Briton just nine points down before the season kicks back into life at Zandvoort at the end of August – and still very much in the game. It’s now anyone’s guess how this engrossing battle will be resolved across the rest of 2025.

Norris unlucky at the start

Only third on the grid behind Piastri and Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari on pole position, Norris really needed to make a good start at a track notoriously tough for overtaking. And initially, it looked like he’d nailed it. Momentum was with him as the pack swarmed down to Turn 1… and then it wasn’t. Piastri had blocked his route on the inside line, which left an open door for George Russell and Fernando Alonso to sweep by him on the outside line. Norris went wheel to wheel with the Aston Martin on the run to Turn 2, but now on the outside line for the long left-hander he was forced to cede. Disastrous.

The switch to a one-stopper

As Leclerc kept out of range of Piastri up front to stoke hopes of a Ferrari win, Norris quickly picked his way past Alonso on lap three. But third-placed Russell proved a tougher nut to crack. As the race settled in, it soon began to dawn on both McLaren and Norris that they’d have to do something different to those ahead of them to stand any chance of making it at least on to the podium and limit the points-loss damage.

Before the race, one stop hadn’t been predicted as anything like a decent option for this Grand Prix. But cooler than usual temperatures at the Hungaroring created a welcome sense of unpredictability across 70 gruelling laps.

Piastri came in for his first stop on lap 18, with Leclerc responding in kind a lap later to thwart the undercut. Russell also stuck to the script by pitting at the same time as Leclerc, giving the lead to Norris. But now what? The medium Pirellis held up for longer than he could have hoped, so he just stayed out there, running all the way to lap 31 before taking on the hard compound. When the team suggested this was it and he should now run to the end, Norris accepted the challenge with a tone that reflected his state of mind: given how the race had started, he had very little to lose.

A faultless defence

But that meant 39 laps on the white-walled rubber. As the second stops played out, Norris now had a lead to defend – if his tyres were up to the job. On lap 46 once the order had settled, Leclerc was seven seconds behind the McLaren (having taken on another set of hards on lap 40), with Piastri a further four in arrears (having pitted, also for more hards, on lap 45). The chase was on.

Now Leclerc’s challenge faded, to the Monegasque’s intense frustration. Piastri easily passed him into Turn 1 on lap 51, and with 19 still to go the expectation was Norris’s advantage of 8.4 seconds just wouldn’t be enough. All eyes were on the McLarens as a race that had slowly brewed now started to come to the boil.

Except that gap didn’t reduce as quickly as Piastri might have hoped. Both McLarens were on the limit, with Norris calm and crucially error-free as the laps counted down. But still, Piastri had his prey in sight – and the only question was, when would he find himself in range to strike on that run down to Turn 1?

The moment came on the penultimate lap, as Piastri edged closer with the aid of DRS. McLaren hearts missed a beat as he lunged for the inside, briefly locking up hard on the brakes – and came only inches away from skittling his team-mate out of the race. So close. Perhaps too close, even for Piastri.

His final attempt at the same corner on the last lap looked a little half-hearted, as if he knew how marginal his previous attempt had been. As Norris made his exit from Turn 1 it was clear he had this one in the bag, and he cooly completed the lap to secure his ninth – and perhaps best – F1 win so far. It was also the 200^th for McLaren, a mark only Ferrari (on 248 wins) has also achieved.

What they said

“I’m dead,” Norris said with a smile in the post-race interview. “We weren’t really planning on the one-stop at the beginning, but after the first lap it was kind of our only option to get back into things. It was tough.”

Victory hadn’t been in his mind, only a podium. But against all expectations, the strategy – and his clinical execution – had been enough. “The final stint with Oscar catching, I was pushing flat-out,” he added. “But it’s good, rewarding even more because of that – the perfect result today.”

Piastri, typically, took the defeat in good spirit publicly – even if his disappointment was all too evident by the look on his face as he sat in the cool-down room before the podium ceremony. “I pushed as hard as I could,” said the Aussie. “After I saw Lando going for a one [stopper], I knew I would have to overtake on track, which is much easier said than done around here. Today we were just on the wrong side of it.”

Leclerc’s agony

From early in the race, Leclerc had been voicing his concern about a problem on his Ferrari. He was careful not to specify what he was talking about, but suggested it was something the team could have avoided had it listened to him. Then those worries spilled over into uncharacteristic rage after the second round of pitstops when Leclerc’s victory hopes slipped away, along with his pace.

Afterwards, he was more conciliatory, admitting he was mistaken on what had gone so horribly wrong. But there had been a problem – something with the chassis, which remains unspecified. Whatever, he rowed back on blaming his team.

After losing all hope of victory, Leclerc was then powerless to prevent Russell relieving him of at least a second podium in a week, following his third place at Spa. When the Mercedes made its attack, Leclerc briefly resorted to marginal tactics in his “erratic” defence, as the stewards put it. The way he moved towards Russell on the brakes into Turn 1 earned him a five-second penalty – not that it affected his fourth place at the flag.

Master and apprentice score in tandem

Behind the top four, Fernando Alonso followed up on Aston Martin’s superb (and surprising) qualifying form, when he and Lance Stroll had locked out the third row. Alonso too adapted to a one-stop strategy to finish where he started in a season-best fifth. Behind him, his protégé Gabriel Bortoleto also stopped only once to take his Sauber from an excellent seventh on the grid to sixth. The Brazilian rookie had matched his mentor mile for mile at the Hungaroring in one of the best drives of the day, while Stroll made it a double score for Aston with a fine seventh.

Misery for Verstappen and Hamilton

But there was little to smile about for Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton as they contemplate their individual struggles during the summer break. Verstappen never looked comfortable all weekend in the Red Bull, and having qualified only eighth dropped a position behind Racing Bulls’ Liam Lawson to trail in ninth. A decision to make his first stop early backfired and left Verstappen mired in traffic, and he was never able to recover.

As for Hamilton, his demeanour after a terribly lacklustre weekend has set tongues wagging about his future once again. His damning assessment of his own performance on Saturday – “just useless” – created forlorn headlines overnight, and from 12^th on the grid he never looked anywhere close to channelling the spirit of Nigel Mansell, who took a famous win for Ferrari here from the same starting position way back in 1989. In contrast, Hamilton lost two places at the start, then toiled on the hard tyre on a one-stop strategy that didn’t work that far back in the pack. Having been spooked off the track at Turn 4 by an aggressive Verstappen, for which the Dutchman escaped sanction, all Hamilton could manage was to finish where he started. We can only fear for his state of mind as the F1 holiday begins.

Images courtesy of Getty Images.