Big picture: a dramatic swing of fortune in Oscar Piastri‘s favour after team-mate and title rival Lando Norris retired his McLaren from second with a late-race engine failure, turning what was looking like a seven-point loss to Piastri to one of 25 points. Plus the nine by which he already trailed Piastri, making it a 34-point deficit with nine races left. Against a team-mate who can seem to do no wrong.

Piastri’s performance was calm and resolute throughout the weekend. He turned an initial pace disadvantage around to sneak pole by hundredths and made the perfect conversion of that. Each of the three safety car restarts was brilliantly judged, and he was helped in this by the McLaren, which can get even its hard tyres straight up to temperature just fine even versus Verstappen on a set of softs.

Toto Wolff called that a humiliation for every other team, but actually the hard here was the C2, which was not super-hand for the high energy demands of this track – the two banked corners put a disproportionate amount of energy into the rubber. Still, this was one of the bigger advantages McLaren has enjoyed this season.

Verstappen and Red Bull tried to pierce it by an adventurous choice of the soft tyre on which to start. Although it got him off his third-place grid slot well enough, the medium-shod McLarens were equally accelerative and Verstappen went into Tarzan still third, as Piastri sprinted off into his perfect afternoon. But Max hung on around Norris’ outside and just kept hanging on until they went into the quick T2 side-by-side. The Red Bull began to spin, but Verstappen caught it despite a major wobble – and as he did so passed Norris for second.

Such was the McLaren’s pace advantage that Norris was able to go around Verstappen’s outside at Tarzan after eight laps – and from there set chase for his team-mate. Piastri was just trading off tyre life to keep Norris out of DRS reach. But Norris had a great turn of speed too and the gap steadily shrank as they left Verstappen well behind.

Now it was Verstappen’s turn to focus on behind as Isack Hadjar‘s Racing Bulls tailed him closely enough to occasionally nudge into DRS range. This was a fabulous weekend for the rookie, having qualified fourth despite missing FP1 to a power unit failure. In fact, there were three such failures through the weekend, including Norris’.

This was the last race before Monza, the track at which everyone wants to have their newest engines fitted. So several of the motors in use this weekend were towards the end of their mileage life. Hadjar’s replacement fresh motor may have contributed to his great grid place, but he still had to deliver the lap – and in the race, he looked more than comfortable tracking Verstappen ahead of him and keeping Charles Leclerc‘s Ferrari off his back.

Only just behind the Verstappen-Hadjar-Leclerc train was another featuring George Russell‘s Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton‘s Ferrari. They were all lapping at much the same pace and there’s nowhere to pass unless you have an advantage of around 1.5sec per lap.

Light rain was on its way, which would have repercussions. Ferrari brought in Leclerc on lap 22 for an undercut attempt on Hadjar. On the very next lap, Hamilton got a little crossed up on the damp painted part of the banked Turn 3 and from there slid hard into the wall. The safety car this brought out allowed everyone to pit onto hards on which to get to the end. So far from jumping Hadjar, Leclerc was jumped by Russell instead. The rain cloud then blew away.

Leclerc wasn’t up for accepting the overtaking delta number and launched an audaciously late out-braking attempt on Russell into the chicane from a long way back. By the time Russell realised he was there, he’d already taken up much of the Ferrari’s survival space. Leclerc clattered through the gravel on one side and scraped along the Merc’s floor on the other. But he made the pass.