Lando Norris wins Austrian Grand Prix in style to close to within 15 points of second-placed Oscar Piastri

In an old incarnation as the Osterrichring this place could have been called the prettiest graveyard in the world. But at the Red Bull Ring on Sunday it was the scene of rebirth for Lando Norris and his world championship dream.

He won the Austrian Grand Prix in style to close within 15 points of second-placed Oscar Piastri.

Crushed last time in Canada, a stupid crash confirming the scrambled state of his mind, here he drove smartly, calmly, cleanly in a brilliant duel with his McLaren team-mate Piastri, the man he had driven into only a fortnight before.

For 20 laps less than a second separated the two of them, the Bristolian Norris in first place, by dint of a stupendous pole position, and the Melburnian Piastri in second.

How much had Norris learned from his meltdown in Montreal? As much as he had persuasively claimed in the build-up to this race in Spielberg?

We were to find out. So often rightly criticised for clumsy starts under pressure at the sharp end of the grid, he was away well. He covered the attack of third-place starting Charles Leclerc in the 200-yard sprint into the first bend and this gave Piastri his chance to push past the Ferrari at the outside of Turn One. Job done.

Now the two fastest cars on the grid tracked each other within spitting distance. Neither put a wheel out of place at this early stage. And it was inevitable that when DRS was enabled, as it was on lap six, it would be a papaya-on-papaya battle for the foreseeable future.

For a moment Norris would open up nearly a second. Then that would be chopped. It was absorbing stuff.

Lap 11, it got white hot in the scorching sunshine, the gap down to 0.2sec, and diminishing. Piastri gets a run on Norris and passes him on the outside into Turn 3. Norris has been smart. For he has the chance to take revenge at the next corner. He has DRS this time at Turn 4. He duly passes Piastri on the inside.

Piastri takes a look again at Turn 6 but there is no room. He withdraws.

Both are as a clean as Dettol at this stage.

Hearts, nonetheless, must have been in mouths on the pit wall, where sat Andrea Stella, the calm and fair Italian team principal who has instilled in both drivers again the need to observe 'Papaya Rules'.

Number one on the instruction manual of how to race is – don't crash into your team-mate.

Out there, away from the textbooks, The fight goes on.

Lap 15, the pair came desperately close into Turn 4. Norris repels the incursion very skilfully. He makes one error by going into the gravel at Turn 10. No damage done, but it gives Piastri a sniff.

Lap 20, Piastri overcooks it. He launches himself down the inside of Turn 4. He locks up his front right.

Norris then pits, given the advantage of the first stop by virtue of being leader. Piastri, one imagined, would come in the following lap.

Instead, he was kept out for four laps. My reading of this is that the pit wall had suffered enough palpitations and Piastri's lunge broke Papaya Rules. The two were being deliberately kept apart.

When Piastri had been reshod, he was five seconds back.

And as if to underline the rationale of the delayed stop, Piastri's race engineer Tom Stallard came on the radio to tell him: 'The feedback from the pit wall was that the move into Turn 4 was too marginal. We can't do that again.'

The race was now over as a contest, really. The two men pitted again on laps 52 and 53 (three seconds separating them before the first of these). Note, they were in in consecutive laps this time, just as they would normally have been on the original occasion.

Leclerc finished third for Ferrari and Lewis Hamilton fourth, again clashing with his race engineer Riccardo Adami.

What else? Well, Max Verstappen's hopes of retaining his title, already slim, were dealt a blow when he crashed out on the first lap. Starting seventh, he was taken clean out by Mercedes youngster Kimi Antonelli, who failed to take Turn 3.

The safety car was deployed as Verstappen complained, understandably: 'I'm out, I got hit like crazy. F****** idiots.'

Antontelli said: 'Sorry about that, I locked the rear.' He later explained his situation to Verstappen, who waved to what was practically a home crowd of Dutch fans who had travelled here to cheer him on.

Up in the Red Bull motorhome, at the track they own, a poor weekend was shared with Bernie Ecclestone, friend of the Mateschitz family who own the team and the track.

Red Bull's second driver Yuki Tsunoda finished dead last. Pass the smelling salts, Bernie.

Norris, meanwhile, had some wing damage late on but nursed himself to victory, his third of the season, and perhaps the most important of his 25 years.

And what's next folks? Silverstone next Sunday. Get out the bunting for the boy who wants to be champion of his home race and then of the world.

He took a big step to it here by the Styrian mountains.