He took a circuitous route, but Oscar Piastri leaves the Belgian Grand Prix with his championship advantage enhanced to 16 points and his title campaign bolstered by a decisive victory over teammate and chief rival Lando Norris.
It was an emphatic turnaround following a disappointing Saturday that saw him beaten to sprint victory by Max Verstappen and then pipped for pole by Norris despite having looked like a heavy favourite to dominate the weekend on Friday.
Piastri’s victory was defined by two moments. One was gutsy, the other was cerebral.
Fox Sports, available on Kayo Sports, is the only place to watch every practice, qualifying session and race in the 2025 FIA Formula One World Championship™ LIVE in 4K. New to Kayo? Join now and get your first month for just $1.
The first was his bold lunge for the lead as soon as the race started.
Having been deprived of his lead by Verstappen in the sprint, he knew his best chance to take top spot from his teammate would be his first one.
He seized it mercilessly with a gutsy bit of intimidating driving.
Norris controlled the rolling start after the safety car, but Piastri stuck with him all the way up to the first corner, where a dummy to the inside forced Norris to cover by turning in slightly early.
It gave Piastri the better line through the hairpin and also dished Norris a snap of oversteer on exit.
The Australian now had all the momentum, but he chose to press his advantage further.
“I lifted as little as I dared through Eau Rouge,” he said. “I knew that I was just going to lift a little bit less than Lando did and try and keep it on the track.
READ MORE
‘Nicely f***ing done’: Perfect Piastri claims crucial F1 win after more Norris blunders
Piastri lifts lid on F1 masterstroke as Norris delivers classy response to title blow
‘Now you’re quiet?’: Verstappen’s dad grilled on Horner sacking in frosty exchange
Piastri picks off Norris in first lap | 00:32
“It was a bit lively up over the hill, but I managed to make it stick, and from there the tow helped me out.”
It was no faint-hearted move, but it meant he was so much faster after cresting the hill that he was easily into the lead halfway down the Kemmel straight.
Norris was suffering a battery issue that made him particularly vulnerable, but McLaren CEO Zak Brown suggested after the race that Piastri was also afflicted by a similar problem at the start of the race too. This was pure Piastri execution.
It was crucial he got the move done. With the transition to slicks imminent as the track dried, whichever McLaren driver was leading would get pit priority — something that eventually cost Norris around eight seconds for having to wait an extra lap for his sole stop.
That was the gutsy move, but his long final stint was even more impressive for his ice-cold nerves.
Like 18 other cars, Piastri switched to the mediums.
There were still 32 laps to go when he left pit lane.
Pirelli estimated that the useful performance life of the medium tyre was just 20 laps and that after 25 laps it would be slower than the hard.
Norris, with nothing to lose from second, switched to the hards, which were slower but would make it to the end of the race.
Piastri wins a wet Belgian Grand Prix | 03:52
He needed to gain on his teammate by around 0.3 seconds per lap to win. Sure enough, the gains started coming after 20 laps and began flowing more freely after 25 laps.
But Piastri had been centimetre perfect up to that point to ensure his buffer was large enough that his teammate would run out of laps before he could apply any real pressure.
And in a flourish directed to those who would seek to diminish his victory in any way, he set his fastest lap of the race on the penultimate lap, on 31-lap-old tyres, underlining just how much he’d been controlling the race — and how little doubt there really was about his victory.
“We had it mostly under control, which is what I wanted,” he said. “I was pretty disappointed with myself after yesterday, but it runs out starting second at Spa’s not too bad after all.”
PIASTRI BY THE NUMBERS
More than being significant of the championship, Piastri’s weekend as Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps was history making for an Australian in Formula 1.
He’s the first Australian in history to win six championship grands prix in a single season.
Jack Brabham and Alan Jones jointly held the record with five in 1960 and 1980 respectively — though Jones also won the 1980 Spanish Grand Prix, which was stripped of championship status after the fact due to an unrelated off-track political drama.
Of course both Brabham and Jones had far fewer races in a season. Brabham’s five came in a campaign of 10 grands prix (50 per cent), while Jones’s quintet was won in a 15-round season (35.7 per cent).
Piastri can get ahead of Jones in percentage terms if he wins three more times this season, while he would need another seven victories to surpass Brabham on that same metric.
This was also Piastri’s eighth career victory, equalling Daniel Ricciardo’s career tally.
He’s now just one win short of manager Mark Webber’s set of nine.
And with 11 grands prix remaining, Alan Jones’s tally of 12 (minus that controversial Spanish Grand Prix) and Jack Brabham’s record of 14 are in sight.
This was also Piastri’s 31st consecutive finish in the points, a run that started at last year’s Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix.
That takes him to equal fourth with Max Verstappen for successive scores. Only Lewis Hamilton (48 and 33) and Verstappen (43) have longer streaks inside the points.
“What’s impressive is how aggressive he is, and yet he always brings the car home,” Brown told Sky Sports. “That’s quite a talent.”
Piastri also led home McLaren’s first one-two in Belgium since David Coulthard led home Mika Häkkinen in 1999. It’s the fifth time he’s headed a one-two finish for the team, the most since two-time champion Mika Häkkinen took 10 between 1997 and 2000.
McLAREN STRATEGY SPLIT HINTS AT GROWING TITLE CONFIDENCE
The promise of tense finish was set up by McLaren prompting Norris to consider an alternative strategy at his sole pit stop.
While every other driver went for the medium tyre, he chose the hard compound instead to put his teammate under some pressure to alter his approach.
“I think it was so close there at the end,” Brown told Sky Sports. “We weren’t sure if Oscar was going to be able to carry the medium.
“Too close to call — is it a mistake when both cars end three seconds from each other at the end of a grand prix with no safety cars?
“It’s kind of hard to say one got it right, one got it wrong.”
But arguably Norris’s most significant opponent in the second stint was himself.
Three critical errors — one in Pouhon, where Piastri had been faster all weekend — and two at La Source — cost him several seconds of race time.
Finishing only 3.415 seconds short of victory means these mistakes collectively were significant.
‘Miles earlier!’: Max on rolling start | 01:02
Norris argued that conditions were difficult on the drying track and that his strategy required him to push throughout the race to have any hope of beating Piastri. He had nothing to lose, and in that sense the mistakes cost him nothing after being deprived of first place.
But Nico Rosberg pertinently though somewhat uncharitably asked aloud on the Sky Sports broadcast whether a driver like, say, Lewis Hamilton — a multiple world champion — would make those sorts of mistakes in the same situation.
Regardless of the particular outcome this weekend, it was interesting to see McLaren willing its drivers to take opposing strategies while battling each other.
Verstappen in third is 81 points behind Piastri and 65 behind Norris — surely all but out of contention, even if Brown wasn’t willing to say those words in the aftermath.
While McLaren is being scrupulously fair in the way it handles its drivers, eventually it will have to admit that only they can claim the championship, at which point the leash will have to be loosened on things like strategy and perhaps even bigger questions like set-up.
And that’s when the team risks the gloves really coming off in what’s clearly a one-on-one fight for a maiden world championship.
WHY THE RAIN DELAY?
If you turned on your television in time for the original race start, you might have been surprised to see the race suspended in relatively light rain and with limited standing water on track.
Compounding the confusion was that the rain subsided as the cars returned to pit lane under red flags.
The race eventually got going 80 minutes late, after the sun had come out and the track had begun drying.
Cue another argument over F1’s approach to wet-weather running.
There’s no doubt these sorts of weekend present something of an image problem — what should be the world’s best drivers in the world’s most elite motorsport category unable to handle a little bit of weather.
But performance is precisely why the race couldn’t start on time.
The modern Formula 1 car produces so much downforce and has such wide tyres that they generate immense amounts of spray behind them.
That problem is even worse at a high-speed circuit like Spa-Francorchamps. The faster a car travels, the more spray it generates.
If you’re the lead car in the field, you’re not affected — though Norris said even the spray from the safety car was problematic.
If you’re in the pack, however, you’re racing blind — and the prospect of accelerating past 300 kilometres per hour without being able to see the circuit or the cars around you is obviously unsafe.
Combating spray and the resultant lack of visibility is something the sport has been tackling since — funnily enough — the 2021 Belgian Grand Prix, which was farcically declared after two laps behind the safety car in conditions of too-poor visibility.
The FIA subsequently developed and tested a variety of wheel covers, which would be attached to cars in wet-weather situations, but they had no significant effect on reducing spray and have since been abandoned.
Pirelli has said it will investigate whether tread patterns on its range of wet tyres can be adjusted to reduce spray.
It will be interesting to see if next year, under new rules that will slash downforce considerably as well as changing the way downforce is generated, reduces spray on its own.
To some extent, however, the problem is intractable. Formula 1’s extreme level of aerodynamic performance combined with it being an open-wheel category comes with some fundamental compromises, one of which is spray.
Separately, it’s also fair to argue over whether drivers really needed four laps behind the safety car to start the race on a track that was already so close to slicks. It felt like an overabundance of caution following criticism that the safety car wasn’t used quickly enough last time out in Silverstone.
But that’s a separate issue of judgement.
ALBON BEATS HAMILTON IN GOOD AFTERNOONS FOR BOTH
Remarkably this isn’t the first time a Williams has beaten a Ferrari fair and square this season, with Alex Albon leading home Lewis Hamilton at the end of a long defensive race ahead of the seven-time champion.
But unlike the previous time in Miami, this weekend both drivers walked away satisfied.
Albon had verified Williams’s upgrade package — the only substantive new bits the team will bring to the car this season — had worked.
The FW47 has become trickier to drive but with enhanced potential. Albon qualified a superb fifth — his first Q3 appearance in three rounds — and lost only one place in the race, to George Russell in the wet start, on his way to sixth.
“We were a little bit exposed early in the race, then the pace came to us,” he told Sky Sports. “Once we put on the dry tyres, we were quick.
“It’s to a point now where as long as everything’s running smoothly, we should score points.
“That’s a very unique feeling for me and a great feeling for the team.”
It was particularly good in the context of Williams’s battle in the midfield, with the team comfortably outscoring all its chief rivals to extend its lead in fifth place in the championship to 27 points.
“We finished 12 seconds ahead of the next midfield car — a good statement of intent from us, and hopefully we can keep scoring some good points,” he said.
Despite being beaten by a Williams driver, Hamilton was happier than he’s been since arriving in Belgium on Thursday.
The Briton took to the rolling start in 18th after his Saturday qualifying disaster but was aggressive in the wet first stint to rise five places.
He then perfectly judged the timing of the switch to slicks — he was the first driver in — to rocket up to seventh after the rest of the field followed suit.
He harried Albon, but he revealed afterwards that he’d been underfuelled for the race, Ferrari having expected more rain, and thus had his challenge curtailed.
But walking away from the weekend with points left him optimistic for this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix.
“Great work by the team,” he said. “I’m disappointed to have had not such a great weekend — definitely one to forget — but at least I still got some points, and we outscored Mercedes collectively.
“I don’t always get it right. I’ll try and come back stronger next week.
“I think I know the car a lot better now with all the changes that we’ve made.”