Lando Norris withheld pressure from McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri to win the Hungarian GP after an alternative one-stop strategy jumped him ahead of his rivals.
In a tense final few laps, Lando Norris defied a faster two-stopping Piastri to win the Hungarian GP by less than a second.
The papaya cars were ultimately in a class of their own and the Hungarian GP was the latest hard-fought tussle between the championship rivals. The dominant McLaren pair finished 21 seconds ahead of third place George Russell.
The key for Norris – who was running in P4 after the opening stages of the race – was a one-stop strategy.
This jumped him ahead of the two-stopping Piastri, Russell and Leclerc and it proved to be the quicker strategy on the day.
Norris was satisfied with his execution of the strategy when he spoke after the podium celebrations.
“I think it’s one of the first ones I’ve won in this manner. I’ve not won many races, so most circumstances are still new. But I think it’s the first one where doing a completely alternate strategy to most worked out.
“I think there have been some others where going long in the first stint, Miami, then getting the Safety Car, things like that have helped me from a luck side. Today, there was not really any of that.
“So I think the most rewarding from ‘let’s try to do something different’ and it working out.
“It’s a tough strategy to do, but it worked out – that’s the most important thing.”
Managing the pace was the key to Lando Norris’ victory
After losing a position to Russell – and briefly Alonso – at the start, Norris opted to extend his first stint and attempt a one-stop strategy.
Rather than follow teammate Piastri into the pits around lap 19, Norris extended his first stint on the medium tyre to lap 32 of 70.
But this left him vulnerable to Piastri who had 14 lap fresher tyres at the end of the race and was reeling him in by around half a second per lap.
Norris revealed that the key to victory was managing pace rather than the tyre life.
“I made the mediums last until lap 32 or something. So it wasn’t a terrible thought that I can make the hards last until the end.
“It was more I just knew I’d have to push flat out for basically every single lap, and that’s when it gets a little bit tricky.
“The tyres get hot. It’s easy to make mistakes. The last few laps, the rubber is probably pretty low, and it’s just so easy to lock a tyre into one, into two, the chicane, things like that.
“So, yeah, I knew I could make the tyres get to the end quite easily, but it was more to stay ahead of the other people.
“It was trying to get ahead of mainly George and Charles at that point. I didn’t have a lot of hope that I’d still be in a fight with Oscar till the very end but turned out to be. So that was even better.”
A ‘worst case scenario’ first lap is forgiven
Norris laughed when he was asked after the race what was going through his mind at the end of lap 1.
“‘Brilliant.’ That’s actually what I said over the line on the first lap. I watched quite a few videos of lap one to turn 1. Clearly, it didn’t work.
“My start was good. I’ll look back and review it and see what I could have done better. I feel like I was more just unlucky with how things panned out.
“I think if we were to do it again, most of the time things would turn out better than they did today. So, I think it was just worst-case scenario. But my start was good, and I have nothing to really complain about.”
Victory for Norris reduced Oscar Piastri’s championship lead to just 9 points going into the summer break.
It was a landmark 200th victory for McLaren and a ninth career win for Lando Norris.
