Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri go through their F1 Hungarian GP strategy and late tussle, as Andrea Stella gives background of the discussions.
The fall of Norris to fifth proved to be a blessing in disguise in F1 Hungarian GP at Hungaroring. It gave him the chance to try a different strategy which wasn’t the optimal one as per team boss Stella. Pre-race, they had discussions on it, but felt two stop is the best way to go.
During the grand prix, they re-visited those discussions. For Piastri, it was too early to decide, but for Norris, it wasn’t an option but a forced choice after he lost places at the start. He had a good start but was boxed behind the Australian on the inside, which cost him a place on George Russell.
His exit was compromised which allowed Fernando Alonso through as well. He managed to get back on the Spaniard soon, but passing Russell proved to be difficult. It forced Norris onto one stop, which wasn’t ideal. But as the race progressed, things started to look better either way.
Piastri lost out as he not only had to cover Charles Leclerc, but also his teammate. The team delayed his second stop to give him the tyre advantage after he couldn’t clear the Monegasque in the first stop. The ailing Ferrari driver was easy meat for the Australian, which left him with about 10-12 laps of chase.
He caught the back of Norris with 4-5 laps in his hand. But passing him became a challenging job. He locked-up and almost rear-ended the Brit. His teammate held firm and eventually got the crucial win to cut the points lead to just nine points, heading into the summer break.
Norris acknowledged that he wasn’t sure about one stop and just tried something different which worked. Piastri couldn’t have done so due to Leclerc in between. It was a lot of risk for him to try the one stop after he pitted early the first time to undercut the Monegasque.
Race –
Norris: “I think it’s one of the first ones I’ve won in probably this manner. I’ve not won many races, so most circumstances are still new, but I think it’s the first one where doing a completely alternate strategy to most, giving myself that opportunity, worked out. I think there have been some others where going long in the first stint, Miami, then getting the Safety Car, things like that have helped me from a luck side. Today, there was not really any of that.
“So, I think the most rewarding from “let’s try to do something different” and it working out, which was a good one. It’s a tough strategy to do, but it worked out. That’s the most important thing. And, honestly, I didn’t really think it was going to work for the majority of that second stint. But with every lap, I kind of gained more confidence that it was going to be closer and closer. So, yeah, definitely a rewarding one.”
Piastri: “Mixed, I would say. Whenever you lose a race by such a little amount, it’s obviously a bit painful, but I mean, I’m sure it was entertaining from the outside. It was entertaining from the inside as well. So, you know, pretty fun race, all things considered. But, obviously, when you’re on the losing side of that battle, it’s a little bit difficult. But, yeah, we tried our best, I think, and, you know, we got ahead of Charles. I don’t know what happened to him in the last stint, but, yeah, some things to look back on, whether we should have done something a bit different in terms of strategy, but very easy to say in hindsight.”
What happened on Lap 1 –
Norris: “‘Brilliant’. Yeah. That’s actually what I said over the line the first lap. Because I did, I watched quite a few videos of lap one to Turn 1. Clearly, it didn’t work. My start was good. I think Charles’ was pretty good as well. Oscar then came over to the left, and I was kind of just hoping both were going to be on the right. I got a bit of a slipstream on Oscar. I had to pull out to the right, but Oscar could stay in the slipstream of Charles, which then gave him a bit more speed again.
“But at that point, it was hard to back out and go to the left because I would have had to brake a bit. I mean, I’ll look back and review it and see what I could have done better. I feel like I was more just unlucky with how things panned out. I think if we were to do it again, most of the time things would turn out better than they did today. So, I think it was just worst-case scenario. But my start was good, and I have nothing to really complain about.”
Fight at the end for win –
Norris: “I mean, it’s more just making them last at the pace that we were at. I made the Mediums last until, like, what, lap 32 or something. So it wasn’t a terrible thought that I can make the Hards last until the end. It was more I just knew I’d have to push flat out for basically every single lap, and that’s when it gets a little bit tricky. The tyres get hot. It’s easy to make mistakes. The last few laps, the rubber is probably pretty low, and it’s just so easy to lock a tyre into one, into two, the chicane, things like that. So, yeah, I knew I could make the tyres get to the end quite easily, but it was more to stay ahead of the other people. It was trying to get ahead of mainly George and Charles at that point. I didn’t have a lot of hope that I’d still be in a fight with Oscar till the very end but turned out to be. So that was even better.”
Piastri: “I was confident, but I knew it was going to be still incredibly tough because getting close to the car ahead is one thing, but trying to overtake is a completely different story. I knew that I was catching him a lot when I had clean air, but as soon as I got close, it was incredibly tough to stay close enough. There are so many corners in the middle sector that in some cases it almost feels like you do a better job in some corners, and then you pay the price at the next one because you’re even closer. That made it very tough. And then with such long corners to end the lap, it just kills any downforce you’ve got. So, I knew that was going to be incredibly tough. Even if I had more laps, I’m not sure the result would have been any different, but I certainly tried.
“[The lock-up didn’t hurt,] not that much, I don’t think. I was able to close the gap again pretty quickly for the last lap. But it’s kind of like I said, getting to within six or seven tenths was doable, but to then get even closer than that, I think I needed brand new Softs to be able to do much from that point. So, yeah, it was always going to be tough when I got close. But, I mean, you never want to not take an opportunity that you think is there in case another one never comes up. So, I had to go for it and, you know, in hindsight, obviously you can say maybe I should have waited another lap, but I’m pretty convinced that even if I had waited one more lap, it wouldn’t have changed anything.”
Stella: “I would say that both drivers, Lando and Oscar, are driving at a very high level, in absolute terms, when it comes to race craft in Formula One. As we see, it’s always very close, it’s always very marginal. And if we take today, in fairness, I think both will have to be happy with their driving. Lando found himself on a deviating strategy and he had more clean air, more laps in which he could use the full potential of the car. Oscar spent quite some time behind Leclerc, this might have cost him a bit of time, but I think both executed their race at the highest standards. And no surprise, they are both great drivers, they are both improving race by race, and I’m sure they will keep doing this until the end of the season.”
Strategy –
Norris: “When Will asked me, “What do you think of the one-stop?” I think at that point, I was already, like, seven seconds behind Oscar and eight or nine behind Charles. So, not that I thought my race was over, but it was pretty slim that I was going to be able to at least fight from there, even on a perfect two-stop strategy. So, my expectations were not high, but I was more banking on a safety car or a VSC or something to bring me back into the race. But I didn’t have any of that. In the end, I guess it didn’t matter. I can’t remember if it was just before George boxed or just after that. Will said, “What do we think of a one-stop?” and I said, “Let’s do it.” My confidence wasn’t the highest, but it was my best chance of trying to do something. And it turned out to be a little bit trickier because it actually allowed me to fight until the very end for the win. Not sure it still felt like the best strategy, but I think with how difficult overtaking was, it turned out to be pretty good.”
Piastri: “I think we had to try and do something to beat Leclerc because it wasn’t obvious that we just had enough pace to blow past him and go and win that way. So, we tried something. Was it the right thing in the end? I don’t know. But it’s always much easier when you’re the car behind to take that risk. For Lando, there was virtually nothing to lose by trying a one-stop race. For myself, potentially there was. And, yeah, we’ll look back and see if there was anything we should have done differently. But a two-stop was always the plan before the race, so it wasn’t even really discussed that much about doing a one-stop. So, it was certainly a gamble.
“We did speak about it a bit before the race, so it wasn’t completely off the table. But, in the race, I got asked about it. Very difficult to know from the cockpit what is going to be the best thing to do. Like I said, when you’re the car behind, your risk-reward ratio is always much different. So, yeah, there’s always that. Could we have matched Lando? That’s, I guess, the question that I don’t have the answer to. So, I guess that’s the only thing. But we wanted to try and win the race as well, and the best way of trying to beat Lando is by trying to win the race as well. That was obviously an intention, but I think we’ll definitely analyse if there was something we could have done a bit differently.”
Stella: “Had we pitted Oscar before, he might have ended up behind Lando, but we wanted to give Oscar enough of a tyre delta to pass Leclerc, but also to have a fair chance on Lando, because that would have meant being on an optimal two-stop. So we wanted to make sure that thinking about Leclerc, we were not deviating too much of an optimal two-stop, because that would have been unfair to Oscar in relation to his competition with Lando, which was fair. And we also checked with Oscar what his preference was. Certainly he wanted to have an opportunity to win the race. And we thought that with enough tyre delta to Leclerc, Oscar would have had a chance anyhow. So I think actually, let me say that the race unfolded pretty much as we hoped it would unfold in terms of tyre behaviour, which means tyres that lasted enough for a stop when we decided to keep Lando out. Also in the second stint, tyres and car pace that would have allowed Oscar to pass Leclerc.
“And then actually the two strategies proved to be quite equivalent. Our baseline strategy today was a two-stop strategy. We didn’t think necessarily that the one-stop was possible. So with Oscar we tried to go on a good, deterministic two-stop strategy, trying to pass Leclerc in the first stop, then we tried to extend in the second stop to have a tyre delta in order to have those few tenths of a second to be able to pass Leclerc and this did work. When it comes to Lando and the one-stop strategy, when we extended, leaving Lando out, we didn’t think that the one-stop would have been possible still. But credit to Lando, he managed to put together some very strong sectors and lap times with tyres that were relatively used. So we somehow convinced ourselves that the one-stop was starting to get in the game as we progressed with the first stint. It wasn’t like entering the race with a one or a two-stop and we would have picked being them equivalent. We thought that the two-stop would be the dominant strategy today.
“The thing in terms of the two-stop for Oscar and the stopping time is that also his tyres were starting to suffer a little bit in the first stint. It wasn’t clear what the power of the undercut would have been but it was worth a try. And even extending when you have tyres that don’t behave very well, not necessarily, will make the extension something that will reward you. So we wanted to give a first go trying to pass Leclerc. We knew that there would have been a second go later on in the race. And at the time definitely the one-stop for Lando was outside of any card. Because like I said before, it’s an option from a strategic point of view that we discovered while we were staying out with Lando and we saw that he was in condition to put together some competitive lap times.”
Here’s race start: https://www.formula1.com/en/video/2025-hungarian-gp-a-clean-start-for-leclerc-but-norris-loses-two-places-on-opening-lap.1839440037511338813
Here’s Oscar Piastri passing Charles Leclerc: https://www.formula1.com/en/video/2025-hungarian-gp-piastri-overtakes-leclerc-for-p2-on-track.1839444784844827509
Here’s Oscar Piastri locking-up: https://www.formula1.com/en/video/2025-hungarian-gp-piastri-locks-up-as-he-attempts-late-overtake-on-teammate-norris.1839446756480185125
Here’s Lando Norris winning: https://www.formula1.com/en/video/2025-hungarian-gp-norris-reacts-to-winning-thrilling-race-after-battle-with-piastri.1839448510884156222
Here’s Charles Leclerc losing out to McLaren
Here’s how F1 Hungarian GP panned out