In this tightly contested season in which so little separates the championship contenders, there couldn’t have been more fitting a race to send the sport into its mid-year sojourn than the Hungarian Grand Prix.
Lando Norris slashed his championship deficit down to nine points with a perfectly judged win over title leader Oscar Piastri, his margin of victory just 0.698 seconds.
If you think that’s close, consider that it’s more than twice as large as the usual gap between them over the season, with Piastri finishing on average 0.298 seconds ahead of Norris after 14 rounds.
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It sets us up for a thrilling final 10 rounds when Formula 1 resumes at the end of the month in the Netherlands.
The story in the constructors championship, however, couldn’t be more different.
This was McLaren’s 200th grand prix win. It’s just the second team in the history of Formula 1 to score the double ton, after Ferrari.
McLaren call costs Piastri Hungary win | 02:38
This was also its fourth consecutive one-two finish. It’s the first time McLaren has finished in one-two formation four times in a row since 1988, when Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna split the spoils in Mexico City, Montreal, Detroit and Le Castellet.
The 1988 season is the most dominant in the team’s history and one of the most one-sided seasons of all time, with McLaren winning every race but one and Senna beating Prost to the title by three points after the application of the drop-score rule.
It’s a sign of just how powerful this McLaren team has become that it’s being mentioned in the same breath as the 1988 squad, and while it’s not on track for quite the same scale of domination, it’s now on course to claim the constructors championship with unprecedented haste.
McLaren, on 559 points, leads Ferrari by 299 points, an average advantage of 21 points per round.
If it continues on that trajectory, it will win the constructors championship at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix just three races from now and with seven rounds to spare.
Red Bull Racing holds the record for earliest championship win, claiming the 2023 title with six rounds remaining.
These are matters for happy contemplation over the European summer.
But it’s tough to pick who between the drivers will spend those long northern days more satisfied with the first half of their campaigns — and with the epic duel that decided the winner in Budapest.
Piastri & Norris INCHES from colliding! | 00:48
NORRIS CLAIMS IMPORTANT WIN IN IRONIC TWIST
Norris was outqualified by Piastri and beaten by the Australian to the first turn. He dropped to fifth on the first lap and quickly lost touch with the leaders.
But rather than break it, these are the events that made Norris’s race in a tremendous ironic twist.
While he quickly passed Fernando Alonso for fourth, his inability in the first stint to overtake George Russell, whose Mercedes was just fast enough in a straight line to be immensely frustrating, meant he was at best set to finish third behind Piastri and then leader Charles Leclerc.
With nothing significant to lose, he rolled the dice on a one-stop strategy to see if it would stick.
The one-stop strategy was calculated before the race to be meaningfully slower than the two-stop, but it allowed a driver to keep track position, which is key around the narrow Hungaroring. It would get him ahead of Russell and, if he was lucky, maybe Leclerc, minimising the damage to the presumably successful Piastri.
“I didn’t really expect it to work,” Norris told Sky Sports. “I was a long way behind by the time we committed to the one-stop.”
But the gamble paid off handsomely. His tremendous early pace on the hard tyre rocketed him back into contention, and he saved just enough rubber to ensure he wasn’t easy pickings for Piastri in their three-lap duel at the end of the race.
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All because of his small mistakes on the first lap after qualifying third.
“It was more unlucky with how things played out ahead of me,” he said of his first-lap losses. “If it worked out any other way, I could have tried to make a position up. but that’s life, and we turned that little downside of lap 1 into the opportunity to do what we did today.”
The victory was worth seven points in his battle with Piastri, closing his deficit to nine, but the mathematics is irrelevant with 10 rounds still to go.
What this win was worth in the narrative of the title, however, was far more significant.
Norris was put under perhaps more pressure than he has been at any point in a year that’s been partly defined by his unforced errors.
He did more that survive. He nailed it.
“The last few laps were some of the toughest laps because Oscar was pushing flat out on a much nicer tyre than my one,” he said. “I was just trying to not make a mistake, really, and when the tyre is at the end of a stint, it’s so easy to lock up.
“It just felt so easy to make a mistake. I feel like I drive at 100 per cent and it’s too much and I’m under-rotating, I’m making a mistake; if I drive at 98 per cent, I feel like I’m just under the limit and I’m not getting anything out of the car.
“There was the 99 per cent limit which was so difficult to be on, but I had to be on it for as long as possible, and I felt like I was on it for a good amount of that second stint.
“My confidence is high. I feel good. I’m not lacking any of it.”
If it wasn’t already clear, it’s game on.
PIASTRI POSITIVE DESPITE POINTS LOSS
You might’ve expected Piastri to step out of the cockpit apoplectic — whatever that looks like for the always-cool Australian — that he’d been beaten by his teammate on an alternative strategy after he’d spent the first part of the race toiling behind Leclerc.
It would’ve been the obvious immediate emotional reaction to losing a victory that never looked likely to go to Norris and copping the ensuing points hit.
But there was none of that from Piastri. He looked as calm as ever.
“I pushed as hard as I could,” he said. “After I saw Lando going for one-stop, I knew I was going to have to overtake on track, which is much easier said than done on track.
“I think I needed to be at least a couple of tenths closer, which was going to take a mistake from Lando to achieve that. I felt like that was going to be my best chance. You never want to save it for the next lap and it never comes, so I thought I’d at least try, and not quite.
“It was a gamble either way, and unfortunately we were just on the wrong side of it.
“The team did a great job. The car really came alive in the second half of the race. The car’s been great all weekend. Thanks to the team.”
In a separate interview with Sky Sports, Piastri re-emphasised that he had no issue with losing out on strategy.
“Going into the race we though a two-stop was the best thing to do. In clean air potentially it still was, but having a two-stop race in clean air versus dirty air is a different story.
“It’s very easy now to say that a one-stop was the way to go, but one second different and the answer would be very different.
“There are some things to analyse with the team, but overall I thought it was a good day.”
This wasn’t Piastri putting on a polite face for the cameras — after his penalty at the British Grand Prix, we know what angry Oscar looks like.
This was Piastri seeing the bigger picture.
After 14 rounds — more than half the season — he still leads the championship by nine points. He hasn’t lost the lead since seizing it Saudi Arabia despite wild fluctuations in the margin.
He was also the faster driver around the Hungaroring, nominally a Norris circuit. He was also clearly faster at the end of the race, proving that he was on the faster strategy, even if it wasn’t the better one.
It might be tempting to think Norris goes into the mid-season break with the momentum, having won three of the last four grands prix. Certainly he has his mojo back.
But momentum doesn’t have to be zero-sum. Piastri can claim to have been faster in race conditions at all four of those grands prix, losing out only for being on the wrong side of small percentage situations, some of which have been out of his control.
If you wanted to be anyone heading into the mid-season break, it’d still have to be Piastri, who’s already proven so many of his title bona fides in just his third season in Formula 1 and who remains the favourite to win the championship.
An unlucky defeat in Hungary doesn’t change that.
WAS McLAREN’S STRATEGY FAIR?
There was only one call with which Piastri appeared to take mild issue, however.
“I don’t know if trying to undercut Leclerc was the right call in the end,” he said.
If Piastri’s strategy let him down, it wasn’t because he was on what had been assumed to be the faster strategy. It was because it was misdirected at overcoming Leclerc, who isn’t in title contention, while his championship rival was rolling the dice.
Intriguingly even his race engineer, Tom Stallard, seemed to be flat-footed late in the race, when it was clear Norris was a victory threat, when he asked Piastri whether he wanted his last stop timed to beat Leclerc or beat his teammate. Surely the answer was obvious.
One week after Norris attempted to win the Belgian Grand Prix with a slightly different strategy, the two cars diverged significantly in pit lane tactics to have a material effect on the outcome.
In a straightforward race, with the two drivers on equal strategies, Piastri should have won easily enough given his qualifying position and his first lap. Instead McLaren’s gamble on Norris’s recovery turned the tables.
“You just had two different strategies there that converged, and it couldn’t have been closer,” McLaren CEO Zak Brown told Sky Sports. “Oscar was faster there at the end and just couldn’t get by.
‘**** turned in on me!’ Russell fumes | 01:43
“I spoke with him as soon as he got out of the car. Unlike Silverstone, where he was obviously disappointed he didn’t win, I think here he knows everyone gave it their best shot. That’s just kind of how the chips fell.”
This won’t be the first time this situation comes to pass this year.
With the team willing — and admirably so — to let its drivers race freely, at some races that will generate different strategies. Having diverged two races in a row, perhaps the two sides of the garage have even been enlivened to the opportunity to outfox each other tactically.
But that isn’t without risk.
Some will be unhappy that Piastri was beaten because Norris was put on a Hail Mary strategy suggested by the team. Some may view that as the sort of interference the team is trying steadfastly to avoid.
The more it happens, the greater the risk the impression sticks and the title showdown boils over.
WHAT HAPPENED TO LECLERC?
Leclerc looked like a genuine candidate for victory for around half the Hungarian Grand Prix.
The pole-getter had done everything right. He’d got the perfect launch to leave the field behind, he’d kept Piastri at arm’s length throughout the first stint and he was fast enough around the first pit stops to fend off the undercut and retain the net lead.
Norris’s strategy blindsided Ferrari, but Leclerc didn’t just lose the lead of the race; he tumbled off the podium in a remarkable capitulation.
The Monegasque finished fourth and 42.560 seconds off the lead.
To put that into context, Leclerc was passed by Piastri, on fundamentally the same strategy for second place with 20 laps remaining.
That means Leclerc lost a stunning 42 seconds to Piastri in just 20 laps — a loss rate of 2.1 seconds per lap.
Deflated Lewis says ‘a lot’ is going on | 00:51
It was a disaster, and the Monegasque could see it coming in the race.
“I can feel what we discussed before the race,” he said cryptically as he began to drop off the pace around halfway into the grand prix. “We need to discuss those things before doing those.”
When his worst fears became reality and he saw George Russell looming large in his mirrors, he exploded over radio.
“This is so incredibly frustrating,” he fumed. “We’ve lost all competitiveness.
“You just have to listen to me. I would have found a different way of managing those issues. Now it’s just undrivable — undrivable.”
Leclerc thought the team had been too aggressive with a front-wing adjustment at his previous pit stop, but he revealed afterwards that he’d been informed after the race that his problem was actually related to the chassis. He said it was a one-off problem that wouldn’t occur again.
However, team principal Frédéric Vasseur told Sky Sports Italy after the race that he wasn’t sure what the problem was and that it might be related to tyre pressure.
There was considerable speculation after the race that his lack of pace could be related to several changes made to prevent the plank from being too badly worn and thereby risking disqualification. Some of those changes could be increasing tyre pressures as well as detuning the power unit to ensure the car wasn’t hitting top speed at the end of the straights, when the floor would be closest to the track surface.
Certainly Piastri’s straightforward for second overtake suggested the Ferrari suddenly lacked the straight-line speed that had been such an effective defensive tool up until then.
Whatever the reason, the result perpetuated Leclerc’s stinking pole-to-victory record.
Leclerc has a prolific 27 pole positions, putting him 11th on the all-time list and only two behind Juan Manuel Fangio.
But he’s converted only five of those poles to victory. He’s turned inly one of his last 16 pole positions — Monaco last year — into a win.
“It’s very frustrating to have everything under control to know that the pace is in the car to win and then you end up being nowhere,” he told Sky Sports. “We even lost the podium, so very disappointing.”
Ferrari search for its first win of 2025 continues.