McLaren driver Lando Norris of Britain leads the race in front of McLaren driver Oscar Piastri of Australia during the Austrian Formula One Grand Prix in Spielberg, Austria, Sunday, June 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Bandic)

A quick scan of the headlines after the Formula 1 (F1) race in Austria on Sunday, June 29, summarize the race with Max Verstappen’s early exit and McLaren’s Lando Norris beating his teammate, Oscar Piastri. Those are certainly key points of the race, but they don’t tell the story of how fantastic this edge-of-the-seat race really was for a spectator.

Practice over the weekend showed McLaren certainly had pace to top the pack, but Mercedes looked competitive in the first session and Verstappen’s Red Bull is always lurking towards the top of the timesheets, reminding everyone he is still quite relevant when it comes to vying for pole position.

When qualifying actually took place on Sunday, it became obvious the practice times through the weekend could be thrown out the window for all the teams but McLaren. Ferrari, who was basically nowhere throughout the practice sessions, managed to qualify in second and fourth with drivers Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton, respectively. Mercedes struggled to even make it out of the first round of qualifying, let alone to the third round to try for pole.

In the first round of qualifying, the gap from first to 20th (meaning all the cars on the grid) was less than one second. Third through sixteenth positions were covered by less than 0.3 seconds. The teams were very tightly matched up and down the order, but McLaren remained in a class of their own. This was put clearly on display in the second round of qualifying where, again, one second covered the spread of all cars, but there was a 0.3 second gap between the two McLaren cars at the front and everyone else from third through fifteenth.

Charles Leclerc kept things interesting in the final qualifying session, putting up the closest challenge yet to Lando Norris who led every single session of the weekend he took part in. Leclerc couldn’t beat Norris’ time, but did manage to get second place thanks to a spin from Pierre Gasly in an Alpine that brought out yellow flags compromising the laps of both Max Verstappen and Oscar Piastri.

Questions raged throughout the paddock after qualifying since the one lap pace of qualifying doesn’t really tell the full story of what the race might hold. F1 cars in qualifying trim often use higher performance engine modes, have only enough fuel to get through a few laps (instead of the whole race as they do on Sunday since there is no refueling in F1 racing), and only need their tires to last for one lap instead of several racing laps.

With over two hundred pounds of fuel at the beginning of a race, the cars will handle very differently, with some teams and some drivers able to come to terms with it better than others. Ferrari is a team that, throughout 2025, has a car that performs much better during the race than it does in qualifying, so Leclerc’s second place seemed tantalizingly promising.

When the lights went out and the race was underway, Norris chopped to the right side of the track, ending Leclerc’s bid for taking the lead, and the move allowed Norris’ teammate Piastri to get past Leclerc as well. He almost got past Norris before the lap was done, but the two McLaren’s checked out on their competition quickly, already more than a second ahead of everyone else by the end of the first lap.

Piastri stuck to the rear of Norris’ car, applying pressure corner after corner, lap after lap. Norris struggled at times, but always kept his car in front of Piastri in that opening segment. All of the yips Norris experienced throughout last season and even at the beginning of this season are showing signs of coming under control and he has been driving very well.

Needing a race win this weekend, Norris did everything in his power to continue his championship push. His rival is his teammate, Piastri, who is still leading the championship by 15 points. Verstappen’s early exit in this race, after he was punted off course by a late braking Andrea Kimi Antonelli, puts him in a distant third position, 61 points behind Piastri.

What really made this race so exciting from a spectator standpoint was the fact this race had an unrelenting pace. Austria’s “Red Bull Ring,” as the track is known, has a lap time just over a minute per lap, so the 71 laps tick down quickly. All of the cars were driving as fast as they possibly could from the moments the race started out to the moment the checkered flag greeted them across the start/finish line.

Isn’t that what racing is supposed to be? Other races this season, Monaco in particular, showed strategy trumps everything else in F1 throughout the modern era. Teams have to balance how many tires they have available, how many parts for the car they have remaining before incurring a penalty for using too many, and how much time is available to develop the car with limited testing time. This results in races filled with strategy instead of a “go faster than everyone else” mentality.

Austria reminded viewers of what F1 drivers are truly capable of. You could see the drivers nearly losing control constantly as the tires degraded. There was always another car behind any given driver, waiting for a mistake to pounce and take the position. Piastri finished about one second behind Norris, still hot on the exhaust of his teammate, in a pulse pounding, exciting race.

One moment in Piastri’s race reminded me how lucky we are McLaren is still allowing their drivers duke it out on track. To set the stage, In the previous race, Norris accidentally crashed into the back of Piastri, ending his race but thankfully not his teammates’ chance to finish. There was a team discussion, but the two drivers seemed completely amicable. In Austria, the racing between the two papaya cars, as they’re known, was fierce but fair.

Back to this race, Piastri dove into a corner late on the brakes, smoke started pouring from under Piastri’s right front tire as he locked up his brakes, and he desperately tried not to run into Norris. Piastri’s race engineer came on the radio to tell him the team said that was too close. Piastri apologized for the near incident profusely after the race, placating the team once again. We’re one more incident away from the team telling the drivers to stay in position, wherever they are on track, and lose the chance to see them fight with one another during the race.

As McLaren has nearly double the points of the nearest competitors (they’re sitting on 417 points while Ferrari in second has 210 and Mercedes in third has 209), they still desperately want to seal up the Constructor’s Championship as soon as possible. Kudos to the team for allowing the spectators to see genuine racing still. Fingers crossed that will continue.

Hopefully this style of racing will also continue as the F1 teams travel to Great Britain for the next round of racing with the feature race taking place on Sunday, July 6, at 10 a.m. Eastern Time.