2025 Dutch Grand Prix

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.