Sometimes, a Formula 1 win is less about speed than strategy and gritty driving.
Lando Norris held off McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri in a tense finish to win the Hungarian Grand Prix on Sunday and boost his title chances.
Overtaking in Hungary is tough, but Norris had to work hard to keep the win as Piastri loomed behind him in the final laps.
Norris celebrated with a double fist pump on top of his car after claiming McLaren’s 200th F1 win by less than a second to cut Piastri’s standings lead to nine points from 16.
“I’m dead. It was tough, it was tough,” Norris said. “The final stint, with Oscar catching, I was pushing flat out.”
It was the fourth one-two finish in a row for McLaren, with Norris winning three of those head-to-heads as the momentum swung back toward him ahead of the four-week midseason break.
Making the right call
A year on from a contentious first win for Piastri over Norris in Hungary after awkward radio messages, this was a race decided on the track.
Norris briefly dropped to fifth on the first lap but made his tires last to stop only once, while Piastri changed tires twice.
Piastri steadily cut into Norris’ lead in the latter stages of the race but the British driver held on with old tires to take the win. Piastri nearly collided with his teammate when he locked up a wheel while trying to pass on the second-to-last lap. Still, it was Norris who held on to have the last word in their title fight.
“Good racing. Good strategy. Good call,” was how Norris summed it up on the radio.
Piastri’s two-stop approach happened because, at the time, he and McLaren were more focused on getting ahead of Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, whose pace eventually fell away anyway.
“It wasn’t obvious that we just had enough pace to blow past (Leclerc),” Piastri said. “For Lando, there was virtually nothing to lose by trying a one-stop race. For myself, potentially there was.”
George Russell took third for Mercedes after fighting his way past Leclerc in a contest that earned Leclerc a time penalty for nearly colliding with Russell while defending.
Defending champion Max Verstappen was only ninth after being off the pace all week. He stays third in the standings, but drops to 97 points off leader Piastri in another heavy blow to an already unlikely title defense.
Ferrari frustration
Leclerc started on pole position with hopes of landing Ferrari its first Grand Prix win of the year, but ended up fourth after a radio message of what he later admitted was misplaced blame aimed at the team.
“This is so incredibly frustrating. We’ve lost all competitiveness,” he told the team over the radio. However, he later told broadcaster Sky Sports that the car actually had a chassis problem he only learned about later.
A day after calling himself “useless” and questioning whether Ferrari might need to replace him, Lewis Hamilton ended up 12th, exactly where he started. His comments after the race seemed set to fuel more speculation about his troubled first season with the Italian team.
“There’s a lot going on in the background that is not great,” Hamilton told Sky Sports, without explaining further.
Hamilton never seemed to have the pace to fight for points and was at one stage forced off the track by Verstappen as his old rival overtook him.
