A debut win at Monaco is a special moment for any driver and Lando Norris duly drunk in the atmosphere as he revelled in his victory having finally conquered the challenging test on the streets of Monte Carlo. For the McLaren driver it has reignited his championship charge but as for the race itself, which had hoped for something of a reboot of its own with mandatory pit stops imposed, the brave new world had an awfully familiar sense of deja vu.
Norris’s win was without doubt a nerveless display of precision execution by driver and team worthy of note and of victory, as he held off Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc in second, with his McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri in third. Max Verstappen was fourth for Red Bull and Lewis Hamilton in fifth from seventh on the grid for Ferrari.
Norris had led from pole and once he had held off Leclerc into Sainte Devote by the narrowest of margins, he had the race by the scruff of the neck and did not let go. His team principal, Andrea Stella, was spot-on in describing it as cold-blooded in how clinically he delivered and it has brought him to within three points of title leader Piastri, with Verstappen 25 points back in third.
Yet across the 78 laps there were only two on-track overtakes, with Hamilton making up places when Fernando Alonso retired and through a pit stop over Isack Hadjar. Perhaps the expectations were simply too high. F1 had rightly sought to address the limitations imposed by the circuit that held its first race in 1929, after an absolute procession last year in which the top 10 finished in exactly their grid order.
Enforcing two pit stops was the solution in an effort to inject a spot of jeopardy, some decision-making on the hop, anything that might add a soupçon of vitality to what is otherwise tiresome fare indeed.
It looks spectacular on TV and if one considers the rather gauche vulgarity of mega-yachts glamorous, then there is glamour too, while the drivers still love the intensity of the challenge. But the race itself is too often, as the kids might say, “meh”. The pit-stop policy was an attempt to shift the status quo but ultimately still something of a sticking plaster to the fundamental problem that the cars are too big and too heavy to overtake here.
So it proved again. One on-track pass was made when George Russell, backed up behind a Williams while on differing strategies, the steam all but visible rising from his cockpit in frustration, chose to hurl his Mercedes across the Nouvelle Chicane, gaining the place illegally and blithely announcing he would accept the penalty he knew was coming. Which transpired to be a drive-through, rather more than he had anticipated.
The enforced stops did bring a level of uncertainty to the race that would otherwise have been absent and made it an intriguing game to follow as to how each team would react and respond to one another but ultimately did not make any fundamental difference to how it played out.
For the front five, who largely matched each other through their stops, it worked out in a rather mechanical and predictable fashion rather than throwing a spanner into the works as had been hoped. Norris held his place through the first stops and the second.
There was some tension in the final stages as Verstappen went long on his final stint before his second stop, hoping for a safety car or red flag and bunched up the top four who then circulated nose to tail.
Leclerc duly harried Norris but with a dread inevitability simply had no way through and when Verstappen went into the pits on the penultimate circuit Norris had the lead and the win.
He had earned it and in the bigger picture it was an absolutely vital win. Norris had to hit back at Piastri in an increasingly tight title fight and he did so emphatically to restate his world championship ambitions with a drive that will have given him huge confidence, as he observed.
“The best bit is, my kids one day will be able to tell everyone that I won Monaco, that’s probably the thing I’m most proud about,” he said. “It’s not just the pole or just the race, it was both together and I think that’s perfect, so regardless that’s something to be very proud about for the rest of my life. But also just the meaning, history, the people that have won here in the past, they will not always go on to be world champion but most of them have. In 10 years’ time, I can say I won Monaco that one year, or hopefully a few more.”
He has always maintained that despite his struggle with their car this season, his commitment, his will to battle on was unwavering and he demonstrated it with resolve in Monte Carlo. It was the performance he badly needed, his first win since the season opener and McLaren’s first here since 2008 when Hamilton took the flag.
The memories of this victory will live long then, as he noted, and it may yet prove crucial in the title but F1’s experiment in Monaco failed to yield the desired results.
Hadjar and Liam Lawson were sixth and eighth for Racing Bulls, Esteban Ocon seventh for Haas and Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz in ninth and 10th for Williams.
• This article was amended on 26 May 2025. An earlier version said there were no on-track overtakes in the Monaco GP. In fact, there were two.
