Lando Norris ended the first half of the Formula 1 season with a victory in the Hungarian Grand Prix that he described as “one of my best performances”.
It was a drive that had been a long time coming, after a difficult start to the season for the reigning world champion and his McLaren team.
But when McLaren finally gave him a car of the performance level he had become used to in the past season and a half, he more than made the most of it.
While Ferrari, the pre-race favourites, floundered and made, in the words of their team boss Frederic Vasseur “too many mistakes”, Norris and McLaren were almost perfect.
Even in the context of Kimi Antonelli’s stellar start to the season for Mercedes, this was one of the most impressive and convincing victories of the season.
Norris’ one mistake was on the first lap. He converted his pole position into a lead at the first corner, only to misjudge the grip available at Turn Two, slide wide, and gift his position to team-mate Oscar Piastri.
It looked to have been a potentially fatal error to his victory hopes on a track where overtaking is all but impossible between evenly matched cars on similar strategies, but Norris stayed calm.
Seeing he could easily keep pace with Piastri despite being in the dirty air, he said he always believed the win was on.
“It wasn’t my finest Turn Two,” Norris said, “but after that, seeing what my pace was like and I was just better in every sense, in terms of degradation and pace, I was convinced I could still win the race.”
Trapped, Norris begged for a different strategy to give himself a chance of victory, and eventually circumstances presented it to him.
Around half-distance. McLaren pitted Piastri to cover off Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari, which had just stopped for fresh tyres. That gave Norris clean air and he set a blistering pace.
Piastri might still have held the lead, but for a collision with Carlos Sainz as he lapped his Williams. The Australian was angry after Norris came out ahead from his stop a few laps later – but at the Spaniard, not McLaren.
“The fact I could keep up with Oscar on this kind of track, where it’s impossible to follow and impossible to overtake, I was within 0.8 seconds or something for, I don’t know, almost 40 laps, the fact I could do this is what gave me confidence that I’d win the race no matter what, whether he boxed early or late or whatever,” Norris said.
“The pace advantage I had was huge today. But I don’t know why. The cars are identical, and I’ve just been feeling very strong lately.
“I’ve worked on many areas from last year. I feel much more confident lately with how to extract performance, and I’ve worked a lot with my engineers to understand this car because it’s certainly not an easy car to understand and figure out how to drive on the limit consistently.
“So, why? Just hard work. Hard work from my engineers and from myself to improve me as a driver and improve my driving. That is the answer.”
