Oscar Piastri with DHL Fastest Lap in Austria but still misses out on the win

Lando Norris fought back at the Austrian GP in the teeth of fierce opposition from teammate and championship leader Oscar Piastri who pulled out all the stops in the race and even managed to secure the DHL Fastest Lap to put him back in contention for the win again.

Still, it had been very obvious at the outset even on Friday that Red Bull Ring specialist Norris would present a strong challenge to Piastri. In FP1, Norris simply watched on as McLaren junior Alex Dunne drove his car before cranking up the power a notch or two, taking best times in FP2, FP3, Q1, Q2, and Q3.

Piastri, on the other hand, only managed third place on the grid. Still, he muscled his way into second place immediately at the start, locked into the DRS window behind Norris and launched a whole series of attacks in the run-up to the first round of pit stops. None of which helped, as Norris kept his nerve. Piastri then tried a different strategy and extended his first stint by four laps so as to have better tires ultimately.

“It didn’t really pan out that way,” said Piastri after the event – the decision dropped him six seconds behind Norris, which he couldn’t make up in the middle stint. “We’ll go through it and check whether it was the right thing to do.” At the second stop, both drivers were very close behind one another, and Piastri gave it one last shot in heavy traffic filled with backmarkers.

A series of lightning-fast laps, which included the DHL Fastest Lap time of 1:07.924, then brought him within two seconds of Norris briefly with ten laps to go, but his rival managed to pull away again and Piastri had to let him go in the end. He told us later: “I felt like the pace this weekend has been good. So, I think once I could stay in the DRS, I felt pretty good. Afterwards, once I dropped out after the first stop, it was tough to make the progress to get back. But yeah, some things to go over, see if we could have done anything better.”