Austrian GP conclusions: Verstappen’s Mercedes guarantee as Russell’s words come back to bite

McLaren driver Lando Norris claimed his third victory of the F1 2025 season in the Austrian Grand Prix at the Red Bull Ring.

Norris survived an early onslaught by team-mate Oscar Piastri to convert pole position into victory, with Charles Leclerc finishing third for Ferrari as Max Verstappen suffered a rare retirement. Here are our conclusions from Spielberg…

Something has changed in Lando Norris

It is a different Lando Norris we’re dealing with now, it seems, this side of the Canadian Grand Prix.

Once he had completed the rigmarole of apologies – to Oscar Piastri and to the team and to anyone else who would listen – for the incident in Montreal two weeks ago, Norris could cling to the fact that he was much the faster McLaren driver that weekend.

If only he had kept his nerve in Q3, Lando would have started from pole position, would have almost certainly won the race and the contact with Piastri on the pit straight would have never even happened.

If all had gone as planned, if all had gone as it should, Norris would have been in an entirely different postcode to Piastri that afternoon.

As noted in PlanetF1.com’s conclusions from Canada, the front-suspension upgrade introduced by McLaren at that race brought with it the potential to transform Norris’s 2025.

Having felt all year that the car wasn’t quite to his liking after McLaren’s decision to move the steering arm forward over the winter (below) had dulled his feel for the front end at the start of 2025, finally in Canada he felt he had something he could work with again.

What was mere theory a fortnight ago now feels like the start of a potentially season-defining trend.

How else to explain Norris’s irresistible pace in Austria?

Jumping into the car after missing first practice and instantly outpacing Piastri, as if losing 60 minutes of track time to his title rival mattered not a jot?

Dominating qualifying from start to finish, culminating in a pole lap 0.521s quicker than anyone (albeit flattered slightly by the yellow flags)?

If finally being reunited with the front end of the McLaren was going to tell anywhere, it was surely going to be here through all those long-duration corners.

It won’t be like this everywhere, yet for the second weekend running it was as though the 2024 performance dynamic between Norris and Piastri – a clear team leader with an emerging-but-still-not-quite-there second driver – had been restored.

Since half the lap at the Red Bull Ring is a giant DRS zone these days, Norris was prevented from making a swift escape on race day as Piastri pressurised him throughout the first stint, looking for any opportunity – much as Charles Leclerc had done in Monaco – to push the leader into an uncomfortable place and exploit those familiar frailties.

Yet there was also a certain calmness, toughness and judgement in battle most would not typically associate with Lando in those laps, fighting with all his might to hold the lead until the first round of stops, after which he knew everything would become easier.

This is the Lando Norris of Zandvoort, Singapore, Abu Dhabi last year.

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And if a driver has increased confidence in his car, the likelihood of the mistakes (Andrea Stella much prefers to call them “episodes”) big and small Norris has been making on an almost weekly basis up to this point in the season should reduce dramatically.

Just as Piastri was threatening to run away with this year’s World Championship, all of a sudden 2025 has reverted to the Hamilton vs Rosberg-type battle many envisaged at the start of the season.

Lando in the Lewis role with pace to burn yet with clear weaknesses, mostly emotional and psychological, to be targeted; Piastri as Nico, painfully consistent and banking on the faster guy to self-destruct regularly enough to turn a tight title race in his favour.

Rest assured that Piastri will keep his thumbs firmly on those pressure points.

But might McLaren’s changes to the car have taken Norris out of Oscar’s reach in most normal circumstances? Watch this space.

If Canada was the darkest point of Lando’s season, Austria could come to be remembered as the beginning of a new dawn.

It takes courage, and no shortage of confidence, to do what McLaren do

Some F1 teams have a funny definition of what it means when they say their drivers are free to race.

Christian Horner was always good value for it during Red Bull’s first period of dominance with Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber – you know, back in the olden days when the team actually had two competitive cars.

He would constantly maintain that Vettel and Webber were free to race, but that contact between the two cars was forbidden.

You’re free to race!

But don’t crash!

No matter how much you might try, however, you cannot have the first one without occasionally having the second.

It’s called motor racing, as a former FIA race director – quite popular in Milton Keynes apparently – might say.

Horner may have his own definition, yet when Zak Brown and Andrea Stella, McLaren’s two-headed management team, state that Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri are free to race, they really do mean every word.

It takes quite some courage to adopt, and remain faithful to, that stance knowing what is on the line for both team and drivers this season and exposing yourself to the inevitable criticism when it does go wrong.

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Announcing publicly that contact between Norris and Piastri was not only inevitable at some stage, but that the entire team was actively looking forward to getting it over and done with.

It is that confidence in the system, that trust in the drivers to behave responsibly and accept the blame for their mistakes, that ensured the consequences of the collision in Canada – the type of incident that tends to ignite forever wars inside front-running Formula 1 teams – were kept under control.

Such a philosophy requires no shortage of confidence in the car, either.

On this early evidence, the upgrades McLaren brought to the MCL39 in Austria – changes to the front wing, front suspension, brake ducts and rear-suspension geometry – have made the best car of 2025 close to unbeatable, putting it out of reach of the rest.

By affording its drivers such freedom in battle here, McLaren effectively conveyed the same message it transmitted when it flatly refused to impose team orders on Norris and Piastri at Suzuka and Imola earlier this season.

Yes, there will be bad days, there will be days when it goes wrong and there will be mistakes.

But we’re fully prepared to lose the occasional battle for the sake of winning the war.

And we’ll win enough of the other races to ensure that the lost battles won’t even matter in the end.

It is an impressive way of going racing.

George Russell or Max Verstappen? The choice for Mercedes is simple

When George Russell decided to take on Max Verstappen at the end of last season, there was a danger that it would all end badly – humiliatingly so – for him.

In being so public and personal with a critique crossing into the territory of a character assassination, all Slideshow George succeeded in doing was setting himself up for a fall.

Verstappen, after all, had already been linked with a move to Mercedes throughout 2024 following the departure of Lewis Hamilton to Ferrari.

And with Mercedes investing in the long term with Andrea Kimi Antonelli, if Max was going to replace anyone for 2026 it was always going to be Russell, whose contract just so happened to expire at the end of 2025 as if the timelines had been perfectly aligned.

George, surely, would have known all this when he went into battle in that unforgettable media session back in Abu Dhabi.

And lo and behold, less than seven months later he now finds himself with his future in Verstappen’s hands.

The casual way George let slip in Austria that negotiations between Mercedes and Verstappen are “ongoing” masked the dread he must feel as the wait for a decision on his future goes on.

Russell has waited all his life for an opportunity like 2026 and a car to finally compete for the title.

Yet here is his sworn enemy – or at least the driver he likes to think of as his sworn enemy – threatening to snatch it away and condemn him to a career of unfulfilled potential.

It is that serious; that pivotal a decision.

Whoever Mercedes chooses as its lead driver going forward, be it Max or George, will instantly be installed as the favourite to win next year’s World Championship.

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To give an impression of the advantage Mercedes might enjoy in 2026, it was said by a paddock regular last year that the team is quietly pleased that its three 2026 customers – McLaren, Alpine and Williams – are all in a much healthier state now compared to a decade ago.

Why? Because it means the Mercedes factory team won’t totally dominate next season in the way it did after the last major engine rule changes in 2014.

It is entirely plausible that everyone with a Mercedes power unit – yes, even tiny little Williams; yes, even crazy ol’ Alpine – will win races in 2026 and that the grid for the first race in Australia could read: Mercedes, McLaren, Alpine, Williams… and the rest.

The rumours of a significant Mercedes 2026 advantage – much as a result of its own work at High Performance Powertrains, partly through the failings of others – have persisted for too long now to be dismissed.

And if there is anything we learned from the saga last year surrounding the future of Carlos Sainz – whose decision, revealingly, came down to a straight choice between two teams with Mercedes power for 2026 – it is that teams are remarkably transparent with their data when they really want to sign a driver.

Think Max won’t risk walking away from Red Bull until he’s at least tried the RBPT-Ford engine for real in January? Think again.

Almost certainly he already has all the information he needs from Red Bull and Mercedes to make an informed choice, a choice he will not regret, for 2026.

So which is it then, Toto?

Remain loyal to a driver you have invested in for close to a decade and gradually watched blossom into one of the quickest and most rounded on the grid today?

Or seize the last chance you might get to sign a multiple World Champion and one of the most gifted drivers to ever set foot in a racing car?

The choice for Mercedes is simple.

In challenging circumstances since 2022, Russell has done all that the team could possibly ask of him, winning races pretty much every time he has had a car capable of doing so.

Yet who is to know how he would respond to the unique scrutiny and pressures of an F1 title fight?

Could Mercedes say with confidence that the George of 2023/24 – scrappy, snatchy, guilty of trying to force it too often and making costly errors as a result – would not resurface? What if he suffers a Lando Norris-style attack of the yips?

None of those reservations, none of those doubts, hang over Verstappen.

Another thing: even if the Mercedes engine is the class of the field in 2026, recent history suggests that the team’s chassis department will have to improve considerably to match McLaren even with the aid of a rules reset.

In that scenario, a driver with the ability to single-handedly bridge the gap and compensate for any shortcomings in his machinery with a potent mix of talent and sheer force of will is essential.

And who could play – who already has played – that role to perfection? Exactly.

That, right there, is the difference between Russell and Verstappen.

George comes only with the promise and potential of winning the title; Max comes with the closest thing you will find to a guarantee.

Yuki Tsunoda should have got out of Red Bull when he had the chance

There was a time in the early months of 2024 when Yuki Tsunoda had the opportunity to take his future into his own hands.

With his reputation at an all-time high after his best-ever start to a season, one that demolished Daniel Ricciardo’s last remaining hope of a return to Red Bull Racing, a number of midfield teams expressed interest in him.

Haas? Now that move would have been per-fect for him, working with a team boss in Ayao Komatsu who (literally) spoke the same language and could have performed the same nurturing role for Yuki as Franz Tost had done previously at AlphaTauri.

Yet just as Komatsu began to explore his availability for 2025, Red Bull slammed the door shut by extending Tsunoda’s contract at last year’s Canadian Grand Prix.

It is set to prove the pivotal moment of his career, one likely to deny Tsunoda the chance of a long and respectable stint in F1.

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Red Bull never intended to sign Tsunoda to the senior team because it knew what the step up – and the shock of being exposed to the same environment as Max Verstappen – would do to him.

Otherwise it would have signed Yuki, not Liam Lawson, as Sergio Perez’s replacement at the end of last year.

Yet Lawson’s humbling stint in the RB21 left Red Bull with no choice but to bite the bullet and finally give Tsunoda a go, totally against its better instincts.

And where has it left him?

With his face in the mud and the light taken from his eyes – just like Lawson, Perez, Alex Albon and Pierre Gasly before him – and with his long-term career prospects in tatters.

Sixteenth and last place in the Austrian Grand Prix, that’s where, and the only driver to be lapped twice over the course of the race.

None of Verstappen’s team-mates this side of Ricciardo, of course, have been particularly reliable or dependable.

Yet such was the lack of hope for Tsunoda’s race in Austria that it would have been no great surprise if Red Bull had packed up early and began the trip to Silverstone the moment Max was eliminated on the first lap.

No Max, no party? It has been that way since 2019, but has never been more true than in 2025.

Since Aston Martin’s partnership with Honda was announced two years ago, there has been an expectation among some that Yuki will end up in green – either in a race seat or as a reserve – sooner than later.

Yet as noted as long ago as Japan 2024, Tsunoda’s face does not fit at a team where Lawrence Stroll has always aimed higher.

A Haas reserve role, maybe, until Oliver Bearman is plucked by Ferrari?

Unless a difficult decision is taken, it is hard to envisage that door reopening for a driver with Honda roots now Toyota’s tentacles are wrapped around the team.

Increasingly it seems Tsunoda will struggle to find a place on the 2026 grid now his progress over the last three years has been so catastrophically undone in the space of just three months.

So unnecessary, so avoidable. Yet so, so inevitable.

Let his fate be a lesson – listen up, Isack – to potential Red Bull drivers of the future, or at least for as long as Max remains in situ.

Take a leaf out of Carlos Sainz’s book and treat Red Bull as a platform rather than the final destination.

Liam Lawson is back off the canvas

Maybe Liam Lawson was never as good as he looked during his first brief taste of F1 in the middle of 2023.

Yet nor was he as bad as he has appeared at times in 2025 either side of his bruising experience alongside Max Verstappen.

He has performed his best Daniil Kvyat impersonation in the months since his demotion, carrying that scarred, confused, slightly shaken look ubiquitous on the faces 0f Verstappen’s former team-mates.

As if he is simply killing time until the next big Red Bull discovery comes along to finally put him out of his misery.

In the car he has looked decidedly second rate too, alarmingly so at times, allowing himself to be drawn into too many incidents with other drivers like a late-Haas-era Kevin Magnussen, F1’s last great battle ram.

Verstappen is often described as a career killer such is his propensity to punish his Red Bull team-mates beyond repair, yet perhaps it would be more accurate to refer to him instead as a destroyer of dreams.

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Elite athletes, remember, have it drilled into them from an exceptionally early age to believe that they are the best out there.

It must, then, come as quite a shock to the system, especially for a personality like Lawson who prides himself on his self confidence, to be struck between the eyes by the realisation that talents like Max operate at a different level entirely.

He may still consider the day he was promoted to Red Bull as the peak of his career – more than once last winter he joyfully recalled the “classic” Christian Horner line: “Welcome to Red Bull Racing” – yet it was also the moment he soon began to understand that there is a limit to his dreams.

And all this at just 23 years old, still with his whole career ahead of him.

Little wonder that it has taken some time, as much as he might protest that his own self belief has always remained fully intact, for Lawson to rediscover his poise.

His performance in Austria, converting sixth on the grid into sixth on race day and being the first car to avoid being lapped by the winner (always a bonus for a midfield driver), should accelerate the process.

Still he remains a pale imitation of the breath of fresh air who arrived in F1 two years ago with nothing to lose and everything to gain.

And perhaps he will never be that driver again having been bombed out of one of the sport’s prized seats in double-quick time.

There is usually no coming back from a humiliation of that nature. Not in an environment in which judgements are made quickly, often without full context, and perceptions stick.

Yet in Spielberg this weekend, Lawson finally hauled himself off the canvas and took guard once more.

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