McLaren’s Lando Norris beat Red Bull’s Max Verstappen with help from the safety car to take his maiden Formula 1 victory at the Miami Grand Prix.

Norris jumped to the front because he was able to make his pit stop when a safety car was deployed at about half distance while others had already stopped.

Verstappen was unable to keep pace with Norris when the race restarted with 27 laps to go, and the Briton stretched ahead, while the world champion had to settle for second ahead of Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc.

"About time, huh?" Norris, 24, said after victory in his 110th grand prix.

“The whole weekend has been good. I’ve had a few setbacks along the way. I knew on Friday we had the pace and just a couple of mistakes here and there but today we managed to put it together, we put the perfect strategy, it all paid off."

In addition to a bit of luck and timing, Norris’ victory was based on genuine pace - he was the quickest car on track once he was released from behind the struggling Red Bull of Sergio Perez when the Mexican made an early pit stop for tyres on lap 17.

From then until the safety car for a collision between Williams’ Logan Sargeant and Haas driver Kevin Magnussen at Turn Three, Norris turned on the pace and set the foundations for his win.

The fact that this was not the usual cruise to victory for Verstappen was obvious when he missed the chicane on lap 21 and displaced a bollard. Red Bull said after the race it had damaged his floor and cost performance.

 

 

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First of many. It was just a matter of time for him to win his first F1 race. McLaren looked really good after the upgrades and we may see him compete regularly with Max in the remainder of the season.

It would certainly be nice to think the season could be more competitive but I think this victory was down to a combination of:

 

1 - good upgrades for McLaren

2 - a track that played to McLaren's  strengths (and masked it's weaknesses)

3 - Red Bull not quite dialling their car in.

 

I'd imagine it's possible that we'll see a couple more races where this perfect storm creates some competition again, but I doubt we'll see him regularly competing with the Bulls.

 

I'd me be more than happy to be proved wrong, though!