Lando Norris survived a tense final few laps to win Formula One’s 2025 Hungarian Grand Prix on Sunday, holding off Oscar Piastri and crucially closing the gap to his McLaren teammate at the front of the drivers’ championship battle to just nine points.
Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc led much of the race but suffered a dramatic, sudden loss of performance in the final stages that ultimately left him off the podium.
Leclerc led the first stint from pole, as Norris briefly dropped back to fifth on the first lap of 70, eventually getting stuck behind Mercedes driver George Russell in fourth.
This changed Norris’ race. He had to run longer after the first round of pit stops, which Piastri kicked off on Lap 18 in a failed bid to overturn Leclerc’s early advantage. After Leclerc and Russell came in on the next lap, Norris then switched onto an audacious one-stop strategy.
He led for much of the next phase of the race before finally stopping on Lap 31. Norris then unleashed a strong pace to catch up to Russell, before Leclerc became the first leader to stop again on Lap 40, where McLaren gave Piastri the chance to build a tire life offset delta.
Norris got by Russell when the Mercedes stopped before Piastri finally came in for more hard tires on Lap 45, which he used to quickly close in on and pass Leclerc with a thrilling move at Turn 1’s outside.
This set Piastri with a challenge to overturn an eight-second gap to Norris over the race’s final stretch — the difference between the pair down from the 12 seconds after Piastri’s second stop. As the McLaren drivers dodged lapped cars and Leclerc fell back into Russell’s clutches — the Ferrari driver furious with his team over its strategy and car setup — Piastri cut his teammate’s lead to under two seconds heading into the final laps.
The gap came down under a second in a tense finale, with Piastri having a big, locked-up lunge at Turn 1 on the penultimate lap, but Norris held on to win by just 0.6 seconds.
Russell passed Leclerc to take third after some feisty defending from the Ferrari driver, which earned Leclerc a penalty, with Fernando Alonso and Gabriel Bortoleto far behind in fifth and sixth. In the race’s other notable moment, Lewis Hamilton (12th) went off the track in a tight clash with Max Verstappen, who produced many great passes on his way to ninth. The incident will be investigated after the race.
A weekend of contrasts for Leclerc and Hamilton
Leclerc’s qualifying magic on Saturday may have given Ferrari a first pole position of the season to celebrate, but its car just didn’t have enough to convert that into a first 2025 grand prix win on a weekend of contrasts across the Scuderia’s garage.
Leclerc retained the lead at the start, arguably Piastri’s best chance to get ahead, and maintained his advantage through the opening stint, even as Piastri tried to undercut him. But Piastri’s later tire delta gave McLaren the pace needed to get a move done shortly after the second round of stops. This, combined with Norris jumping ahead on the one-stop to relegate Leclerc to third place.
The Monégasque driver was pretty direct in his frustration, saying Ferrari needed to listen to him and that it would be a “miracle” if he finished on the podium after falling far behind Piastri, losing as much as two seconds per lap through this phase. Russell was left upset by Leclerc’s defensive moves once he arrived behind the Ferrari, believing the penalty Leclerc later got for “erratic driving” — per the FIA stewards’ documentation — was deserved. But Russell had ultimately got ahead for third place with a lunge in the final stages.
Leclerc, at least, was in the fight for some silverware, unlike Lewis Hamilton, whose miserable weekend never saw him earnestly contend for points. His race was defined by his Q2 exit on Saturday, after which he called himself “useless” and said Ferrari should “change the driver” in his car, serving as another low in his up-and-down first season with the Italian team.
Starting on hard, he was always committed to a long first stint, but couldn’t make much progress, instead spending the opening stint largely staring at the rear of Kimi Antonelli’s Mercedes. He crossed the line in a disappointing 12th.
It’ll go down as a weekend of missed opportunities for Ferrari, especially from the high of Leclerc’s pole on Saturday. And, for Hamilton, a very off-the-boil showing.
Lando Norris wins with a Hail Mary strategy
Twelve months on at the Hungarian Grand Prix, as McLaren managed drivers running first and second, there was a small sense of déjà vu. Piastri was chasing down Norris, but this time the tension was different: they were really racing hard.
Norris had made life more difficult than it needed to be at the start, boxing himself in behind Piastri by taking the inside line and allowing Russell and Alonso to get past him. Although Norris could quickly get back by the Aston Martin, he was then left to struggle in Russell’s dirty air for much of the first stint.
Norris was released into clean air after the leading trio had pitted, and as he began to eke his tires out, the one-stop strategy came into play. “Keen for it?” asked race engineer Will Joseph, offering Norris a Hail Mary win shot. “Yeah, why not?” replied Norris.
It actually put Norris into the pound seat for victory, giving him track position on a circuit where overtaking is such a challenge. Piastri was committed to the two-stop and made clear to his engineer he was more concerned about beating Norris, his championship rival, than necessarily stopping with optimum timing to undercut Leclerc successfully at the second services.
Norris rose back to the lead with 25 laps to go after Piastri’s final stop, knowing he’d be caught up and have to manage his tires carefully to the very end. It went right to the final few laps, Norris doing all he could to hold on, with a pack of traffic ahead giving him dirty air and no DRS assistance, which his teammate successfully reached. Piastri attempted his dive-bomb on the penultimate lap into Turn 1 — locking up and narrowly avoiding contact. It was reminiscent of their battle in Austria, where Norris also prevailed.
The lock-up meant that by the final lap, Piastri was too far back to get Norris, leaving the Briton to cling on and secure a significant victory for his title hopes, going into the summer break with three wins in the last four races.
In Hungary, credit must go to McLaren for managing the race smartly and turning a 2-4 from the first stint into a 1-2 finish. But it was also a good insight into the brewing championship fight between Piastri and Norris. Yes, relations remain cordial, but both are fiercely determined to beat one another to the title; that’s their only focus going into the final 10 races of the season.
Anonymous Red Bull
When speaking with the Dutch media after qualifying Saturday, Verstappen made a brutally honest remark: He doesn’t think he’ll win a race again this season, and he likely isn’t wrong. He said, “I can’t make more of it; that seems clear to me at the moment.”
Hungaroring put one of Red Bull’s weaknesses in the spotlight. The RB21 has struggled in the low-speed corners this season, which is a big quality of this circuit, and the balance issues that have long been present in the car were very prominent. Throughout practice, Verstappen reported that he was lacking grip, and he said this remained the same in qualifying. But the big question was whether there was an identified issue, to which he said there wasn’t.
“This weekend, from lap one, just felt off. We threw the car around a lot, and nothing really gave a direction,” Verstappen later said. “That is the biggest problem because when you change a lot from the setup, it will always give you positives or negatives, and ours was just … nothing worked. It was just going round in circles. Nothing gave you any kind of idea of what to do.”
Despite the cards he’d been dealt, Verstappen made daring overtaking moves to claw his way through the order, especially after he exited the pit lane into traffic having been committed to the two-stopper by Red Bull. He was already struggling with his medium tires by Lap 11, when he was behind Bortoleto, and the Dutchman pitted for fresh hard tires several laps later. He rose back by Nico Hülkenberg and Pierre Gasly for P12, and the Red Bull driver later made a bold move on Hamilton for P11, one that left the Ferrari driver going off track. The stewards will investigate the incident after the race, with the television replays not conclusively showing contact occurring between them.
The flurry of final pit stops helped Verstappen, as he moved up to fifth by Lap 45, but here he faced a notable 22-second gap to Russell, who was on fresher tires. By lap 48, that gap was 26 seconds. Verstappen then made his second stop a lap later and ultimately ended up in ninth.
This won’t be the last track this season where Red Bull will struggle. After all, Singapore is another low-speed circuit. Verstappen finished second, 20 seconds behind Norris, in last year’s race there.
Another strong race for Bortoleto
Sauber has managed to turn around its form, compared to its severe struggles last season and in the early stages of 2025. He might not have taken the surprise podium that Hülkenberg secured at Silverstone, but Bortoleto has starred among the rookie class since Sauber’s car upgrades got it back into F1’s midfield fight. He was in the thick of the points action again during the Hungarian GP.
After winning the 2024 Formula Two championship, his F1 debut didn’t start great. He crashed out in Australia, then endured a series of poor finishes, ending P19 in Japan and securing consecutive P18 finishes in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia before retiring again in Miami.
It wasn’t until the Austrian weekend in June that the rookie scored his first points, bringing home four with an eighth-place finish — and notably ending up ahead of teammate Hülkenberg. But it’s become evident that Bortoleto is starting to find a rhythm, outqualifying Hülkenberg and advancing to Q3 in Belgium last weekend and doing the same at Hungaroring. Bortoleto even managed to outqualify Verstappen on Saturday.
Bortoleto briefly looked to be in trouble early on during the grand prix, after he was noted for a possible false start, but he was cleared, while Hülkenberg received a penalty for the same offense. After starting seventh, Bortoleto made his way up a spot by Lap 2 and was still there after the final pit stops were made, as he and Alonso (his manager) joined Norris in making the tricky one-stopper work well.
It was a relatively quiet but clean race for the rookie, where he secured his best finish of his F1 career to date: a crucial P6, which brought home eight points for Sauber. Bortoleto now has secured three points finishes across four weekends, and his sixth-place finish marks Sauber’s sixth consecutive weekend coming away with points.