MELBOURNE, Australia — Lando Norris‘ 0.8-second winning margin over Max Verstappen in Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix belied the performance of his McLaren MCL39 around Melbourne’s Albert Park.
Amid the thrills and spills of Formula 1‘s crash-strewn season opener, there were moments when the McLarens looked truly dominant. Yet at the checkered flag, Norris’ old friend and persistent foe, Verstappen, was tucked right under his rear wing and kept the pressure on until the final corner of the final lap.
That’s not to say Norris should have won by a bigger margin, but had the race not been plunged so frequently into chaos, he almost certainly would have. The McLaren driver literally and figuratively weathered a storm on Sunday as band after band of heavy rain whipped through the circuit, and in doing so delivered one of his most convincing performances to date.
There was no sign of the indecision that may have seen him throw away his pole position advantage on the opening lap or crumble under Verstappen’s presence 12 months ago. Instead, Norris remained locked in on victory right from the first lap, proving both he and McLaren have spent a winter upping their game in pursuit of the 2025 drivers’ title.
Good for TV
Sat in champagne-soaked overalls with traces of adrenaline still in his bloodstream, Norris reflected on a roller-coaster afternoon as he spoke to the media on Sunday evening.
“To start the season off with a win is good enough, but to do it in such a stressful race, where it’s so easy to make a mistake, so easy to ruin everything, makes it sweeter,” he said. “You know, so quickly, it can all go wrong within any second of the race — you lock up, you hit the white line wrong, you have a big snap … it was just very difficult at times to not go into a wall or a tire barrier somewhere.”
After a hectic afternoon of his own, Verstappen saved his best for last and closed in on Norris in the final laps of the race. It emerged after the checkered flag that Norris’ car had sustained floor damage and was hemorrhaging performance during the final stint, but, as if to underline the level Norris was driving at, Verstappen never truly believed he could make an overtaking move stick.
“I just tried my best to be close, tried to put a bit of pressure on, but it’s very hard to pass around here,” Verstappen said after the race. “There was only one line; even if I had gotten a run into … Turn 9, you have to go onto the wet part, so you can’t really do a lot. But at least it was close. It looked good on TV.”
Some 30 laps earlier, the TV spectacle had not looked so thrilling. Despite Verstappen’s heroic efforts to split the McLarens at the start, he slid wide at Turn 11 on lap 17 and lost second position to Oscar Piastri.
With a dry line slowly emerging but the conditions too damp for slicks, the true performance of the McLaren came to light on their aging intermediate tires. Once running in first and second place, Norris and Piastri spent the next 13 laps extending their lead over Verstappen to a whopping 16 seconds.
The propensity for Pirelli’s intermediate tire to overheat when running on dry asphalt meant the conditions exaggerated a baked-in advantage of the new McLaren over its rivals. It was a trait that first became evident from Norris’ impressive long-run data during preseason testing in Bahrain and was also a factor in the qualifying laps of both McLaren drivers in Australia.
Lando Norris solidified his status as the favorite to win this year’s F1 drivers’ championship by winning the opening race of the season in Australia. WILLIAM WEST/AFP via Getty Images
According to Verstappen, the McLaren’s ability to look after its tires was a game changer in Sunday’s race and a key area in which the reigning constructors’ champions are leading the way.
“I could see it coming,” Verstappen said of McLaren’s advantage in the first stint of Sunday’s race. “I was struggling with my tires; it was similar to yesterday [in qualifying].
“Intermediates are even more of a soft compound, so they are even more prone to overheating. That’s where we — and a lot of teams — are struggling compared to McLaren. They’re simply doing a better job on that. That’s what we need to work on.”
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella had not expected his team’s car to have such a big margin over its rivals this early in the season.
“I think today, once again, we saw that the car interacts with the tires very well because in the first stint we were able to open a gap to the other cars, which I don’t think it’s the car itself only, it’s also how gentle the car is on the tires,” he said. “So I think, in a way, this is a little bit of a surprise for us as to how competitive the car is, but let’s say it’s a surprise in terms of the extent, it’s not a surprise in terms of the objectives.
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Norris: Australian Grand Prix like ‘playing with fire’
McLaren’s Lando Norris reacts to his Australian Grand Prix victory after battling against Max Verstappen and teammate Oscar Piastri.
“The car seems to have achieved some of the objectives that we gave ourselves. The extent, in fairness, we will see more over the next races and this will give us a better understanding of the competitiveness order, but also still I think this weekend, for instance, we have not seen Ferrari. I think they are actually not far from us, so we will see more.”
Norris also acknowledged the trait but suspects there will be some track surfaces and layouts on which it will work against McLaren.
“I think we’ll have tracks where we will be even better, and I think we’ll have a couple where we’ll struggle,” he said. “We were good last year, especially in the second half of the season, but Vegas was woeful. In fact, we were shocking. There are other tracks along those lines where we did struggle quite a bit. We know where we’re going to struggle.
“Even in Bahrain a couple of weeks ago, we came out confident, but everyone was hyping us up a lot, mainly just because our high-fuel pace was very strong. But on low fuel, we were struggling. We were not as quick as some of the others. Even if we took all our fuel out and max the engine mode, I don’t think we would have been quicker.
“We know we have work to do. If we raced in Bahrain again, I wouldn’t be confident we could win the race. But I’m confident that when we go to China next weekend, we can be very strong, because we were strong there last year with not a very good car.”
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The 16-second lead held by the two McLarens over Verstappen was wiped out on lap 34 when the difficulty of the conditions was underlined by veteran Fernando Alonso spinning into the wall and bringing out a safety car. It provided an opportunity to switch to slick tires and inadvertently set up a pivotal moment in the race.
On lap 44, Norris led his teammate into a wall of rain at Turn 12 and both cars slid wide and ran and through the gravel. Norris was able to recover back onto the circuit before Turn 13, but home hero Piastri, who had looked like the faster of the two McLarens just 10 laps earlier, spun onto the grass beyond Turn 13 where his car was briefly marooned.
Reacting to the incident and a pre-race agreement with his engineers to pit for wet tires as soon as rain hit the track, Norris immediately chose to enter the pits and switch back to intermediates. It was a decisive call and further proof of how much more championship ready Norris and McLaren look this year.
“We lost out on a few races last year,” Norris said. “We knew we had to improve in certain areas this year and there’s been a lot of work on trying to make sure we’re snappier and better with communication.
“It’s a difficult situation being first and not knowing what to do with tires. You just know someone behind will get it right behind you, because they’re going to gamble something, and it’ll work out for them. I didn’t want to lose out to someone in the middle of the pack who gambled and somehow won. So, I was just making sure we were prepared, making sure we were on top of it, ready to make the right call.
“That right call was made literally half a second before I boxed, as I was still trying to save the car and didn’t shunt. It turned out to be the right decision. It was more about relaying information and making sure we’re not overdoing it, a good amount of information — giving them my feelings.”
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Piastri: ‘Only myself to blame’ for slide off the track
Oscar Piastri reflects on his “mistake” during the Australian Grand Prix which saw the McLaren driver slide onto the grass in front of his home support.
Verstappen stayed out, which was initially the right decision but backfired when he pushed his luck for a further lap on slick tires. Arguably it was worth a gamble, he likely would have emerged ahead of Norris had he been able to pull off a clean lap before pitting. Either way, any lost time for the Red Bull was neutralized by a third safety car on lap 47.
The way Norris closed out Sunday’s victory has reinforced his preseason status as the favorite for this year’s drivers’ title. But after the experience of 2024, in which Verstappen won four of the first five races and still faced a challenge from Norris in the second half of the season, he is determined to maintain a level of skepticism about his chances.
“Max was three tenths off [in qualifying], last year we were much further off and ended up with the best car by the end of the season,” Norris said. “We were over half a second off at the beginning of last year behind Red Bull and ended up with the quickest car.
“We know we still have a lot of work to do on this year’s car. If you relax in this position, you fail. In Formula 1, if you start thinking things are good and groovy, that’s when you get caught.
“I do think we’re favorites because the team has done an amazing job, and the car is flying, but we will have races where we struggle. If we started the season in Bahrain, I don’t think we would have won, and you wouldn’t be asking me this question. Let’s allow a few more races to take place before making any obvious statements.”
