Australia’s Oscar Piastri has extended his F1 championship lead with a masterful victory at the Spanish Grand Prix, his fifth win of the 2025 season.
Piastri took pole position brilliantly on Saturday and avoided the all-too-frequent issue at Barcelona of being overtaken on the lengthy run down to turn one, getting an excellent start.
Instead it was his teammate Lando Norris who erred, being passed by Red Bull’s Max Verstappen for second.
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While Norris went on to reclaim the place a few laps later, this gave Piastri a valuable gap of a few seconds out in front of his pair of title rivals, which proved critical throughout the grand prix.
Verstappen tried a three-stop strategy which gave him a brief chance of catching Norris for second, but what looked sweet turned sour when the retirement of Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli forced a late safety car.
With no fresh tyres remaining as the leaders all pitted, Verstappen was forced onto old hard tyres – meaning he both couldn’t threaten the McLarens nor hold off Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc.
Leclerc overtook Verstappen into turn one on the safety car restart with five laps remaining, the Dutchman angrily proclaiming he was “rammed into” to no avail, and Leclerc went on to finish third.
Verstappen then fumed at his own team after being told to let Mercedes’ George Russell through and the pair nearly crashed.
“He needs to get black-flagged. He just crashed into Russell on purpose,” Nico Rosberg said on commentary.
“That is bad, bad, bad. That is seriously bad. He just rams him.”
Verstappen was given a 10-second time penalty after the race which pushed him down to 10th.
Norris briefly appeared to be threatening Piastri during the second stint, closing to within about 2.5 seconds of his teammate. That would have placed him in the window to successfully undercut Piastri had he pitted early.
But Piastri had smartly saved his tyres and quickly pulled away again to a six-second lead, and as commentator David Croft put it, was “playing (with Norris) like a cat with a mouse at the end of its paw”.
The lead evaporated when the safety car arrived but Piastri safely navigated through the restart and was not troubled on route to the win.
The result was Piastri’s eighth consecutive podium – just the third McLaren driver to do it, along with Ayrton Senna and Lewis Hamilton.
It gave him a 10-point championship lead over Norris, and a whopping 49-point lead over Verstappen as the title fight threatens to become a purely McLaren-on-McLaren battle.
Finishing order
1. Piastri
2. Norris
3. Leclerc
4. Russell
5. Hulkenberg
6. Hamilton
7. Hadjar
8. Gasly
9. Alonso
10. Verstappen