Verstappen was firmly in control for the first two-thirds of the time before the Austrian Grand Prix, and most fans were probably drowsy, but his final pit stop, Red Bull's mistake in their strongest tyre change, and the Dutchman's difficulties in tyre management, contributed to the final result.
McLaren, on the other hand, learned the lessons of Spain's pit stop strategy, with Norris synchronised with Verstappen at almost every stop, while the Briton was slightly slower than Verstappen in the early stages of the race, giving the Dutchman a 5.819 seconds lead by 22 pit stops. However, Verstappen escaped a five-second time penalty for an unsafe release at the first stop. On lap 31 after a stop, the gap between the two men had widened to 7.1 seconds, and by lap 34 it had widened to 7.9 seconds.
Although Verstappen added 0.8 seconds to his lead on laps 31 to 34, he also paid the price on the tyres, with faster degradation on his hard tyres, and from lap 34 onwards, Norris showed a similar long-distance cadence to Verstappen after also switching to the hard tyres, compared to the 0.2-second difference in the first Stint's two-man lap time, Norris was only three-thousandths of a second slower than Verstappen's long-distance tempo in the second Stint, which kept the gap between the two from widening, but the key was that Norris had more margin on the tyres at this time.
At this point, McLaren also knew very well that with a new set of medium tyres in their hands, Norris might gradually close the gap with Verstappen after two stops, and at the same time, they did not expect that Red Bull replaced Verstappen with a set of medium tyres that used three laps at the second stop, and the old medium tyres did not show the same performance as the first Stint. But given the 7.5-second gap between Verstappen and Norris at this point, Verstappen was still able to claim the victory, even though the tyres wore out faster than the team expected.
But it was this crucial stop that was delayed by nearly 4 seconds because the bolt on the left rear wheel failed to tighten, which made Verstappen's tire change take 6.5 seconds, compared to Norris's tire change in only 2.9 seconds, which made the gap between the two quickly narrow to 2.8 seconds after the pit stop, but it was not over yet, just on the lap, Verstappen locked the front wheel at Turn 4, which allowed Norris to further narrow the gap to 1.9 seconds.
Just a few corners later, Norris took advantage of the DRS gained by the slow car to further erode Verstappen's advantage, snatching back another 0.7 seconds on lap 53, which allowed him to turn on DRS and attack Verstappen on the next lap.
For the next lap, Norris took full advantage of the tyre DRS to keep attacking Verstappen, but at Turn 3 the two men collided and a flat tire. In other words, if it hadn't been for that failed tire change, maybe the two wouldn't have had a wheel-to-wheel situation. Verstappen's failure to win at Red Bull's home ground was mainly due to the team's failed tyre change and his own tyre management, but he knew in his heart that if he was overtaken by Norris, it would be difficult for him to overtake him for the rest of the race.