The first race of the 2025 season saw McLaren’s Lando Norris clinch his fifth Grand Prix win and end Max Verstappen’s record-breaking streak at the top of the championship standings.
However, Norris’ win came far from easy.
The Briton had to soak in the pressure of his McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri charging behind him. With the Australian managing to get within DRS at one point in the race, the situation got so tense for the McLaren pit wall that they urged the 23-year-old to hold position.
With McLaren giving such a team order to Piastri, it may seem that the team are already beginning to favor Norris. However, Norris defended his team by trying to explain why they asked Piastri to leave him alone.
“It was only two or three laps while passing backmarkers,” he began.
“We’d have looked like idiots if we’d kept racing and something happened. But other than that, we were free to race. It was in the team’s interests, not Oscar’s or mine,” further explained Norris.
Norris: “We’d have looked like idiots if we’d kept racing and something happened. But other than that, we were free to race. It was in the team’s interests, not Oscar’s or mine.”
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The middle part of the race saw the McLaren drivers take control of the race. Naturally, the team did not want to create a scenario where either of the drivers tangled with each other or the backmakers and lost the race.
In fact, Norris explained that Piastri was free to race him once the backmarkers had been successfully lapped. But in reality, the Australian’s tires had given up by that point and he couldn’t mount a challenge for the win.
In the dying embers of the race, both McLarens went off the road in the last sector of the track. While Norris was able to make his way back onto the track without much damage, Piastri spun off into the grass outside the penultimate corner.
This allowed Verstappen to close up to the MCL39 of Norris in his RB21. Norris just edged the Dutchman out as the duo crossed the chequered flag separated by less than one second. Piastri, on the other hand, delivered a stellar recovery drive to finish ninth and score valuable points for the team.
