Mark Hughes: Norris bounce back in Austria was spectacular

The McLaren was super-fast around the Red Bull Ring, even by the team’s 2025 standards. Lando Norris was also supremely well-tuned-in to one of his favourite tracks. Those two factors soared his confidence into an upward spiral. The new tweaked front suspension introduced in Montreal was giving him the feedback he felt he’d previously lacked in this car – and it was one of those weekends where no-one got close to him, not in qualifying at least when he was 0.5sec clear of the field.

Team-mate Oscar Piastri could point to not having got his final Q3 lap in because of unfortunately-timed yellow flags (for a spectacular 720-degree Pierre Gasly spin out of the final corner). But run for run, he was always a vital tenth or two behind Norris here.

But in the race those tenths don’t matter so much. All you needed to race Norris here was another McLaren. Because then even if your pace wasn’t quite as good, you could use the powerful lap time boost of DRS here to stay with him and force him to use up his battery defending from you. So that’s what he did for all the first stint, Norris unable to escape that invisible bit of elastic connecting the two cars.

But as the first pitstops of the two-stop race beckoned, Piastri – trying to assert stop priority by being the lead team car – made an optimistic lunge on his team mate into Turn 4. He locked up, only narrowly missed Norris and was left with flat-spotted tyres.

Norris’s engineer Will Joseph reacted smartly by bringing Norris in for his first stop, switching from mediums to hards. Piastri stayed out for a further four laps, trying to get a decent tyre age advantage for the next stint, but those four laps lost him more time than the newer tyres found him over the following 29 laps. Relative to Norris – who was supreme on the hard tyre.

They stopped only a lap apart prior to the final stint both now on new mediums, Piastri rejoining 4sec behind with 17 laps to go. The chase was back on as they scythed through the many backmarkers. Every other car apart from the Ferrari was effectively a backmarker to the McLarens, so there was a lot of traffic. Norris was clearing it and Piastri was following through and steadily gaining. Norris just had to keep his rival from getting within the 1sec DRS range. Piastri got to within 0.6sec of that threshold before Norris then pulled clear again, his cause helped by Piastri being put on the grass as he lapped Franco Colapinto’s Alpine.

Ferrari was best of the rest, Charles Leclerc from Lewis Hamilton. But that’s a slightly misleading picture given that Max Verstappen, having been thwarted by the same yellows in qualifying as Piastri, was taken out seconds into the race by an out-of-control Kimi Antonelli up to Turn 3. They were both out on the spot. George Russell in the same Mercedes which totally controlled Montreal two weeks ago was just not a factor, tyres overheating and over a minute behind at the end.

The Red Bull and Mercedes fiascos left a space for Ferrari to fill, as well as some over-achieving mid-grid teams. The star of this group was Liam Lawson who one-stopped his sweet-handling Racing Bulls to sixth place, towing Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin along the whole way. “I thought I was defending and that Fernando was quicker,” said a delighted Lawson afterwards, “but he told me, ‘No, you were quicker, I was just using your DRS to stay clear of the rest’!”

‘The rest’ he was referring to were the advancing two-stopping Saubers of Gabriel Bortoleto and Nico Hülkenberg. The former took his first points after a great weekend in which he put the upgraded Sauber into Q3. Esteban Ocon did his customarily professional job to bring the Haas home for the final point.

The final word should go to Norris after such a spectacular bounce back from the collision two weeks ago with his team-mate. “We just had some good battles today, and we’ve had a couple in the past. Granted, they probably didn’t last as long as they did today but think we both knew what to expect from each other. We both want to race hard and race fair. It goes both ways, and of course, we kind of have to put Montreal behind us and behind me for sure. It’s something I wish never happened, but it was nice that we could go out and have a good battle and push things to the limits. There were still some close moments, but nothing that would make Andrea [Stella] or the pitwall sweat too much.

“The first stint was difficult just because I couldn’t get my battery up, and it was quite a strategic part of the race. And I was just always vulnerable for those reasons. But as soon as I did the pitstop, I could get the battery back up for the first time, and then I could be a little bit more comfortable.”