How Piastri is "cashing in the learning" to lead F1 2025 title fight

Oscar Piastri was fastest in just two timed sessions at Zandvoort before the 2025 Dutch Grand Prix: Q1 and the most important one of all, Q3. Just 0.089s separated the McLaren drivers in second practice but for the other two hour-long track sessions, Lando Norris had an advantage measured in tenths.

In Q3, the gap was down to milliseconds again, but now Norris was on the wrong side of it, albeit thanks to Piastri taking the benefit of a brief tow from Isack Hadjar. And that’s where the weekend started to get away from Norris.

Max Verstappen lined up third. His team had prudently recognised that such was McLaren’s margin of superiority around this dune-lined circuit, with Red Bull occupying a hinterland in the half-second or so to the remainder of the ‘front-midfield’, it was better to send Max out on used softs for his second run.

Verstappen’s first run had been good enough for third and it would remain so, giving him a new set of softs at his disposal for the race. Ordinarily this might not have been a factor but, even though Pirelli had gone a step softer this year, the new softest tyre available (C4) was looking like it might be a decent race option.

Even so, this was always shaping up to be a one-stop race, despite the softer tyre choice and the raising of the pitlane speed limit from 60 km/h to the standard 80 km/h, cutting the likely pit lane time loss from 22 seconds to 19. This narrow, twisting, old-school circuit has proved a tricky one on which to overtake, and track position is king here even if a two-stopper is theoretically faster.

So that put the onus on the first lap, and Verstappen started on his new softs in an effort to ensure he cleared at least one of the McLarens and was in a position to make some mischief. If Piastri and Norris took off as a pair, he was outnumbered, since team-mate Yuki Tsunoda had fallen short of Q3 again.

Tsunoda's Red Bull woes continued in Zandvoort

Photo by: Mark Thompson - Getty Images

Verstappen at least had that rising star of Red Bull’s junior team, Hadjar, in fourth place. Even as Hadjar digested the achievement of his highest-ever grid position on Saturday, he had written off the possibility of challenging Max “because overtaking him would be very bold and very difficult”.

Given that the remnants of ex-Hurricane Erin had been passing over throughout the weekend, bringing peculiar juxtapositions of pouring rain and bright sunshine via the conveyor belt of an unrelenting wind off the North Sea, weather was expected to be a factor. When the threatening rain did arrive it would not achieve the peaks of the previous days and nights – there wasn’t even enough to warrant intermediate tyres – but it would have a powerful effect on the outcome further down the top 10 and beyond.

All that lay in the future as the drivers gassed it away from the grid. Both McLarens got away cleanly while Verstappen launched as quickly as you would expect, given that they were on mediums and he on softs – but Piastri had his eye on Norris, cutting across from the left-hand side of the grid to defend the inside line.

Since Verstappen was going to have to manage his softs or risk an early stop which would mire him in the midfield, the most pressing question was how much of a leading margin Piastri could build before Norris made his way past the Red Bull

“A decent start,” said Norris later. “I had a dodgy upshift into third, I think, which cost me my momentum, otherwise I think I had a slightly better one than Oscar.”

Verstappen seized the moment to sweep around the outside at the slightly banked Turn 1 and get nearly a car length ahead of Norris before the McLaren regained momentum on the run to Turn 2. Piastri obligingly drifted over to the left and Norris made the most of it, getting most of a car length ahead, leaving Max with no option but to back out or perform one of his speciality maximum-commitment moves into Turn 2.

Verstappen dived around the outside into the queasily cambered corner, caught an enormous oversteer twitch that would have sent a lesser driver into the nearby barrier, and gathered it up quickly enough to retain the initiative over Lando into Turn 3.

Norris had a poor start to Sunday's contest as he dropped behind Verstappen on lap one

Photo by: Zak Mauger / LAT Images via Getty Images

“Oscar then drifted high so I could come inside and I knew Max would go for it in Turn 2,” said Norris. “It was a close one. But I also knew my pace was going to be much stronger so I didn't really have anything to worry about.”

Since Verstappen was going to have to manage his softs or risk an early stop which would mire him in the midfield, the most pressing question was how much of a leading margin Piastri could build before Norris made his way past the Red Bull. The answer was 4.2s when, at the end of lap nine, Norris pulled alongside Verstappen on the main straight under DRS, got the optimal line around the camber of Turn 1, and nosed ahead.

From there Lando pulled away from Max at a second a lap or more, but could only chip away at Piastri. On lap 10 he took four tenths out of his team-mate but from there diminishing returns set in and, by lap 16, their lap times were split by hundredths or thousandths as Norris reported his rear tyres were beginning to give up.

Rain had been threatening for a while but, when it arrived, it seemed of the non-threatening variety: those in the crowd began to pull on their ponchos and hoist umbrellas, and yet there was no scramble for the pitlane. Until Lewis Hamilton took slightly too high a line through the steeply banked Turn 3 and got a wheel on the damp white line, which drew him onto the painted Aramco branding at the border. Just as he looked as if he might escape, his Ferrari crunched into the barrier at the exit.

This was lap 23, and prime pitstop territory. The Safety Car made a rash of stops inevitable, including a double-stack for McLaren. The orange cars emerged from the pitstop phase with the 1-2 intact, though front jack man Frazer Burchell had a scare when Norris was released before the jack was quite clear.

There was to be no repeat of the split strategy which enabled Norris to seize an unexpected victory in Hungary. With both cars locked in to a one-stop race, all other things being equal, Norris was going to have to catch and pass his team-mate on track if he wanted to win.

Strategy options were the same, leaving little chance of a repeat of Hungary

Photo by: Zak Mauger / LAT Images via Getty Images

Norris headed off a brief threat from Verstappen at the restart after four laps behind the Safety Car, and the chase appeared to be on. Or was it?

Although Norris took small bites out of Piastri’s lead during the second stint, the pace of the two cars remained roughly comparable – including a sudden switch-up in pace which can’t be accounted for by track conditions improving. On lap 37, Norris did a 1m14.925s, Piastri a 1m14.826s; next time around it was 1m14.389s and 1m14.732s, then on lap 39 it was 1m14.082s and 1m14.185s. They continued in the low 14s for seven laps before easing off – again virtually in tandem – then headed back down into the low 14s again.

This pattern continued until the next Safety Car deployment. At the end of lap 51, Andrea Kimi Antonelli pitted his Mercedes from sixth place and, next time around, Ferrari called in fifth-placed Charles Leclerc to head off the potential undercut.

“It's not only the last stint. In the middle of the second stint, when they decided to push, they were miles away. Clearly they are a step ahead in quali, but much more than this in the race. Humiliation – I won’t go so far" Fred Vasseur

Leclerc emerged ahead but Antonelli made a 'now or never' dive down the inside into Turn 3, sliding up the banking at the mid-point and tipping Leclerc into a spin which left the Ferrari beached with its front wing off.

McLaren had margin to pit under the ensuing Safety Car – and a set of new hards available for both cars, a luxury not available to others with the exception of Aston Martin. It took five laps for Leclerc’s Ferrari to be craned clear and the mess swept away, after which the McLarens put the hammer down at the restart – and this time Verstappen was dispatched much more easily.

At this point, the pace of the McLarens was much more pronounced and they were lapping consistently in the 1m12s bracket. Suddenly, Norris complained he could smell smoke in the cockpit, signalling the oil leak which brought him to a halt with eight laps to run. The four-lap Safety Car deployment this triggered brought the field together again and, under green flag conditions, Piastri just managed the pace over the remaining four laps once he had broken clear of Verstappen.

A mechanical issue leaves Norris 34 points adrift of Piastri

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / LAT Images via Getty Images

Piastri duly crossed the line 1.271s ahead of Verstappen and 3.233 clear of a delighted Hadjar, who claimed his first F1 podium. Even the casual viewer would not be fooled by the apparent narrowness of this winning margin.

Post-race, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff described McLaren’s pace on hard-compound Pirellis, compared with the softs, as a “humiliation” for everyone else. His counterpart at Ferrari, Frederic Vasseur concurred – but only up to a point.

“It's not only the last stint,” Vasseur said. “In the middle of the second stint, when they decided to push, they were miles away. Clearly they are a step ahead in quali, but much more than this in the race. Humiliation – I won’t go so far.”

There will be other tracks where overtaking is less difficult, and where qualifying is slightly less important. Nevertheless, the Dutch Grand Prix provided another demonstration of Piastri’s ability to put a race weekend together even when his team-mate seems to have the upper hand on pace.

"Oscar's weekend has been a characteristic weekend for Oscar,” said McLaren team principal Andrea Stella. “Building up through the weekend in practice, cashing in the learning. We have seen the delivery at the moment that counts, which is qualifying – and then we have seen that when it comes to the rain, he is characteristically quite comfortable, keeps the situations under control, pretty sharp in execution.

“And while he does so, he remains always calm and lucid. So I think this is one of the, let me say, Oscar-like weekends. It proves his maturity and the level of his racecraft as a Formula 1 driver."

With a deficit of 34 points to overcome, Norris now needs to execute perfectly at every race weekend from now on to haul himself back into contention.