Norris closes gap on Piastri in Hungary thriller
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Oscar Piastri tried everything to overtake Lando Norris in a tense finish but his McLaren teammate held on to win the Hungarian Grand Prix and boost his F1 title chances heading into the mid-season break.
Norris clung on with worn tyres as Piastri loomed behind him in the final laps. He celebrated on Sunday with a double fist pump on top of his car after claiming McLaren’s 200th F1 win by less than a second to cut Piastri’s lead to nine points from 16.
“I’m dead. It was tough, it was tough,” Norris said. “The final stint, with Oscar catching, I was pushing flat out.”
It was a race shaped as much by smart strategy as gritty driving. Norris briefly dropped to fifth on the first lap but made his tyres last to stop only once, while Piastri changed twice.
When race engineer Will Joseph asked Norris on the radio, “Lando, 40 laps on the hard tyre, you up for it?”
Norris replied: “Yeah, why not?”
Piastri said: “I pushed as hard as I could. After I saw Lando going for a one-stop, I knew I was going to have to overtake on track, which is much easier said than done around here.”
Looking at his late passing attempt, he said: “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 that was going to be my best chance. You never want to try and save it for the next lap, then it never comes, so I thought I would at least try.”
Piastri steadily cut into Norris’ lead in the latter stages of the race but the British driver held on with old tyres to take the win.
Piastri nearly collided with his teammate when he locked up a wheel while trying to pass on the second-to-last lap, earning a mild rebuke from his team. “Remember how we go racing, Oscar,” came the warning from his race engineer, Tom Stallard.
Norris held on to have the last word in their title fight as F1 heads into a four-week break. “Good racing. Good strategy. Good call,” was how Norris summed it up on the radio.
For the dominant McLaren drivers, it was their seventh 1-2 finish on the season and the team’s 11th victory in 14 races in 2025.
George Russell took third for Mercedes after fighting his way past Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc in a contest that earned Leclerc a time penalty for nearly colliding with Russell.
Defending champion Max Verstappen was only ninth. He stays third in the standings, but drops to 97 points behind Piastri.
Leclerc started on pole position with hopes of landing Ferrari its first Grand Prix win of the year, but ended up fourth.
“This is so incredibly frustrating. We’ve lost all competitiveness,” he told the team over the radio.
Leclerc dropped so far off the pace in his final stint that the two McLaren drivers and Russell questioned what happened to him as they chatted after the race.
A day after calling himself “useless” and questioning whether Ferrari might need to replace him, Lewis Hamilton ended up 12th, exactly where he started.
Hamilton said he’s facing issues “in the background”.
“When you have a feeling, you have a feeling. There’s a lot going on in the background that is not great,” Hamilton said. But asked if he’d lost his love of racing, he said no.
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said: “Lewis is wearing his heart on his sleeve.
“It was very raw what he said. He was hard on himself. We have seen it before when he felt he had not met his own expectations.”
Fernando Alonso took Aston Martin’s best result of the season with fifth on a slow track that suited his car, with Gabriel Bortoleto a surprise sixth for Sauber and Lance Stroll seventh in the other Aston Martin.
The season resumes with the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort on August 31.
With agencies
AAP
