Lando Norris and McLaren last weekend achieved an extraordinary level of performance around the Red Bull Ring. But there is something about the track which resonates strongly with both team and driver. It’s been apparent in the last few years.

In Norris’s rookie season of 2019 he put what was generally only a Q2/Q3 cut-off sort of car sixth fastest (fifth on the grid after the penalties of others) and raced it to a lapped sixth, between Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes and the Red Bull of Pierre Gasly. This was back in the day when McLaren was still very early into its recovery and the car was around 1.2sec off the pace over the season.

The 2020 Austrian Grand Prix was the first race held amid the multiple pandemic cancellations and was followed a week later by the Styrian Grand Prix. It was a year of total Mercedes domination, but for the first race Norris qualified the McLaren MCL35 fourth fastest, 0.7sec off a Mercedes time (suggesting half-a-second competitive progress since the year before), just 0.15sec adrift of Max Verstappen’s Red Bull and 0.3sec faster than Norris’ team-mate Carlos Sainz. It was the foundation for the first podium of Norris’s career.

After an early soft-tyred cameo pressuring Verstappen’s harder-tyred Red Bull, he settled down as the lead car behind the four cars of Mercedes and Red Bull, gaining a place as Verstappen retired with a PU failure. That fourth became a third after Alexander Albon tried to take his Red Bull around the outside of Hamilton at Turn 4, made contact and spun down the field. But a later safety car put Norris’ podium under threat, allowing Charles Leclerc’s softer-tyred Ferrari to vault past shortly after the restart. But Hamilton, running second on the road, was taking a 5sec penalty for the Albon incident, so Leclerc was officially second, but going into the last lap Norris was not quite within 5sec of Hamilton and so looked set for fourth. To get within 5sec, Norris’s last lap would have to be faster than anyone had gone all race. Remarkably, he did it. It was a stunning lap and delivered under enormous pressure.

The next weekend’s Styrian Grand Prix saw Norris emerge at the head of an all-out multi-car scrap for fifth place behind the Mercedes and Red Bulls. He’d suffered all weekend with a painful trapped nerve in his back and was driving only with the aid of pain-killing injections.

The 2021 season was all about the epic Hamilton/Verstappen scrap for the title, but in both the Styrian and Austrian Grands Prix (held on consecutive weekends again but in the opposite order) Norris was the interrupter. In the first race after qualifying fourth fastest, less than 0.1sec slower than Hamilton’s Mercedes, he ran an early third before the faster cars of Perez and Bottas were able to pass. “A bit of the fun comes from knowing that I’m in a worse car and I’m ahead of them,” he said after the race. “It is cool also realising how much quicker they are today proves how much better their car is. But on a day like yesterday, I outqualified one of them.”

A week later, he went one better, putting the McLaren on the front row, Verstappen’s closest rival and ahead of both Mercs and the other Red Bull. He’d finish the race third after taking a 5sec penalty for contact with Perez when defending second.

McLaren, with the technical brains and philosophies of Andrea Stella and Peter Prodromou working well together, was clearly on an impressive development path, given that they’d been lodged at the back by the end of 2018. But in reality, the MCL35M should not have been on the front row. Over the season, it averaged around 0.5sec off the Mercedes and Red Bull, vying with Ferrari as the third fastest. That it was on the front row and podium here was a Norris over-achievement around this place. Turns 3 and 4, in particular, reward his great sensitivity in combining braking with corner entry.

The 2022 season was an interruption to McLaren’s progress, the early-season overheating brakes issue taking up a lot of development time to fix, and the MCL36A was never a great car. In Austria, only Norris got it out of Q1. He brought it home seventh. It would be the only unremarkable weekend he and the team have had there in six years.

The whole turning point in the natural competitive order came in Austria ’23. That may sound like an odd thing to say about a season in which Red Bull won all but one race. But the updates which went onto the McLaren in Austria that year set it upon a development path which would lead directly to its current dominance. The second part of a big upgrade, which totally reworked the aerodynamic concept of the car, was introduced here, and the team was now on one of the steepest development curves seen by anyone in the last few years. Norris was third in the Sprint race, fourth in the main event, but the significant thing was the changes made here saw the McLaren often the second-fastest car outright for the balance of the season. McLaren had broken back into the big league for the first time in 15 years.

With just a few tweaks, that Austria ’23 car became the MCL38, the car which broke Red Bull’s domination of F1. The Austrian race of ’24 was in essence the very embodiment of the change in the natural order – as Verstappen and Norris came to trade blows, Verstappen desperately fending off the faster McLaren in such a physical way they eventually punctured each other’s tyres – paving the way for an unlikely George Russell win.

One year on, the Red Bull was not even in the same league as the McLaren – and neither was anyone else. In this season of McLaren domination, their performance superiority around the Red Bull Ring was extreme even by ’25 standards. Most of it was gained in the long and interconnected Turns 6-7, where no other car could touch them. Midway between the turns, the McLaren was doing 263km/h, a full 5km/h faster than the second-fastest Ferrari.