Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri make F1 title declarations after tense Hungarian GP duel

Daily Mirror

3 days ago

McLaren took their 200th Formula 1 victory as Lando Norris saw off Oscar Piastri to narrow the gap in the championship to just nine points after 14 rounds of the 2025 season
Lando Norris is relishing a blockbuster Formula 1 title fight after seeing off rival Oscar Piastri to win the Hungarian Grand Prix. The Brit, 25, heads into the summer break just nine points behind his McLaren team-mate after his third win in four and fifth of the season overall.
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He won by less than a second after holding off Aussie Piastri's late charge in Budapest yesterday and declared: "My confidence is high. I feel good and I'm getting a good amount out of the car. Could it be better? Yeah, I still feel like there are things I need to work on. My lap one was not good today, but my starts have been okay.
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"I am not making my life easy and I have got to make it easier for myself. But a win is great and I gained some points today. I think both of us accept that [the other] is going to win every now and then and it is going to be like that for the rest of the year."
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Norris started third but dropped to fifth on the opening lap and decided to change tactics. It worked beautifully, pitting just once and managing those tyres "perfectly" to make sure he had enough to deny Piastri, 24.
He admitted: "I didn't really expect it to work because I was a long way behind by the time we committed to the one-stop. But the end of my first stint was great, the pace was very strong, and I just managed my tyres perfectly in the second stint. My strength of tyre management helped me a lot."
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Piastri said he thought it was "a good day" but his stony-faced expression on the podium told a different story. This was an opportunity missed and the resulting 14-point swing could be crucial come December.
He said: "Going into the race, we thought the two-stop was the best thing to do and in clean air it probably still was. It's easy now to say a one-stop was the way to go, but one second different and the answer would be very different. Overall, I thought it was a good day."
Looking at the bigger picture of his close title fight with Norris, Piastri added: "The pace has mostly been good and I feel my execution of races has been good as well. It's going to be a tight battle all the way to the end. But I'm enjoying it."
Charles Leclerc had started on pole and led the first half of the race. But he suffered an unspecified issue on his Ferrari, which the Monegasque claimed was to do with his chassis, which saw him tumble down disappointingly to fourth place.
He said: "It was around lap 40, as soon as I started to struggle and complain is when I started to have the issue, and then it got worse and worse. It's frustrating to have everything under control, to know the pace is in the car to win, and then to be nowhere and we even lost the podium, so very disappointing."