Verstappen dominates as Italian Grand Prix breaks fastest race record

Max Verstappen dominated the Italian Grand Prix ahead of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri after the McLaren teammates became embroiled in a team orders controversy in the fastest race in Formula 1 history.

Norris got the better launch from second on the grid to run side by side with polesitter Verstappen into the first turn, where he used his position on the inside line to take up the full width of the track.

Verstappen cut the chicane to retain the lead, but the stewards noted the incident, and his team told him to hand the place back to avoid a penalty.

Piastri and Leclerc were bottled up in the first-turn melee, allowing the Ferrari to cut underneath the McLaren and seize third place. It was a short-lived victory, however. Piastri boldly swept around Leclerc’s outside at the first Lesmo at 130mph to resume position.

Leclerc got another shot at the Australian as they started the second lap. Piastri had a look around Verstappen’s outside into the Rettifilo chicane, but the Dutchman’s defense forced the McLaren to yield, incidentally opening the door for Leclerc to usurp him once more.

Their duel allowed Norris and Verstappen to build a gap in the lead until the Red Bull Racing driver got a great run on the McLaren up the front straight. Later on the brakes, he squeezed Norris onto the inside curb on entry and took the lead cleanly.

Verstappen’s slightly better straight-line speed helped him up the road from there, breaking Norris’s DRS on the next lap to free himself to gradually eke open his advantage through the opening stint.

Piastri eventually barged past Leclerc on lap 6 with a perfectly executed move around the Ferrari’s outside at the Rettifilo chicane to resume the top four’s starting positions, but by then he was 3.5s behind Norris, who in turn was losing touch with Verstappen in the lead.

The battle for victory entered a stand-off phase, with none of the leaders willing to pit and risk dropping into a midfield pack that had suffered limited field spread thanks largely to being bottled up behind Gabriel Bortoleto in seventh.

Leclerc attempted to force the issue on lap 33m, switching from medium tires to the hard compound, though at around 7s behind Piastri, there was no immediate response from the trio ahead. Instead both McLaren drivers were contemplating running much deeper into the race before switching to softs in a shorter final stint.

Verstappen, however, was less comfortable. Slow-motion television pictures suggesting potentially dangerous blistering on his ageing rubber, and on lap 37 he switched his medium tires for hards. He was ferocious on new rubber, and with 10 laps remaining he’d closed 12s off the lead, putting him comfortably in the pit window of the leading McLarens.

McLaren pulled the trigger on lap 45, but Norris told the team to pit Piastri first despite the lead driver normally having priority. The Australian’s car was serviced in 1.9s and rejoined the race in third.

Norris pitted on the following lap, but his stop was a disastrous 5.9s owing to a problem with the front-left wheel gun. He rejoined behind Piastri, dropping McLaren into a conundrum.

Having promised Norris he wouldn’t be undercut for pitting second, the pit wall told Piastri to switch positions.

“Is a slow pit stop part of racing?” he said in brief argument, though he immediately acquiesced to the call.

The Australian threatened initially, but on similar-aged tires and in identical machinery, he could find no way past his teammate and settled for third.

But both were outclassed by Verstappen, whose first stint left him a completely untroubled 19.2s winner, his first victory since May’s Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix. His total race time was 73m 23s, the fastest grand prix in championship history.

“It was a great day for us,” he said. “We were flying.

“The car for me was really enjoyable. I could manage the pace quite well throughout that first stint. We pitted at the right time, and then with the hard tires at the end you can just push a bit more.

“Just fantastic execution by everyone, by the whole team. I think the whole weekend we were on it — super-enjoyable to win here.”

Norris admitted second was as good as it was going to get for McLaren at a rare weekend the team was outclassed by a rival.

“Just not the speed today, not the pace of Max and the Red Bull,” he said. “One of the few weekends when we’re just a bit slow, but it was still fun, still a good race, so I enjoyed it.”

He had little to say about his slow stop, however.

“Every now and then we make mistakes as a team. Today was one of them.”

Piastri was similarly coy about the team orders, but the Australian said McLaren’s lack of pace was the more important factor in the result.

“A little incident at the end, but that’s OK,” he said. “Not a bad weekend. Obviously I would’ve loved the performance to have been a little bit better.

“I struggled a little bit in the first part of the race. The car wasn’t exactly how I like. Once the tires went away it actually felt a bit better, which is never a great sign. A lot of things to learn from this weekend.”

The two-three finish puts McLaren within touching distance of the constructors' championship. It leads Ferrari by 337 points and will need a lead of 346 points after the next race in Azerbaijan to clinch the silverware.

Leclerc finished 4.2s behind the McLaren drivers in a decent but uneventful showing in Ferrari’s home race, comfortably seeing off George Russell in fifth.

Lewis Hamilton recovered from 10th to sixth to extend Ferrari’s lead for second in the constructors' championship to 20 points over Mercedes.

Alex Albon beat Gabriel Bortoleto to seventh and best of the midfield, up seven places on his starting position, thanks to a perfectly executed counterstrategy that saw him start on the hard tire and run long, until there were just 12 laps to go, before switching to mediums. His race pace on old hards was so strong that he emerged ahead of Bortoleto, who had headed the midfield in the first stint but whose lap 20 pit stop wasn’t enough to fend off the Thai’s challenge.

Andrea Kimi Antonelli lost a handful of places off the line and recovered to eighth before a 5s penalty for erratic driving dropped him to ninth ahead of Isack Hadjar, who recovered nine places from his starting position with a lap-30 stop that undercut him ahead of much of the midfield.

Carlos Sainz was on track for the final point before being hit and spun around by Oliver Bearman at the Roggia chicane 12 laps from the finish, costing him a score.

Bearman was penalized for the collision and finished 12th ahead of Yuki Tsunoda, Liam Lawson, Esteban Ocon, Pierre Gasly, Franco Colapinto and Lance Stroll.

Fernando Alonso retired early in the race with suspension failure, and Nico Hulkenberg failed to take the start thanks to a hydraulic problem.

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