Norris: Surprised we had the pace that we did

Norris then gained one more place, as the stewards had to deal with a protest by Aston Martin claiming several drivers were not penalized for track limits' violations, which meant Carlos Sainz received a post-race time penalty dropping him down the order.

But the good news doesn't stop there, as McLaren seem to have delivered a decent package in the upgraded MCL60, available only to Norris in Austria, who made good use of it qualifying fourth fastest while being third fastest in the Sprint Shootout, and while his Sprint race was disappointing, his Sunday Grand Prix was far from that.

"A very good day," Norris said in McLaren's post race media brief. "I was a little bit surprised we had the race pace that we did, and it was great to be fighting the Ferraris and Red Bulls.

"More importantly, we beat both the Astons and Mercedes, which was our main goal today. Overall, a good day and good points.

"It's one of those tracks which is easy to get punished on," he added. "We kept it on track and didn't really make any big mistakes, with some good racing at times.

"The team has done a great job again. Thank you to everyone back in the factory for bringing the upgrade because that definitely got us in the points today. A big cheers to them," the Briton concluded.

Oscar Piastri, on the other hand, had to driver to old version of the MCL60 and had a tough weekend in Austria toiling around down the low end of the grid.

"A long afternoon," the Australian said of his grand prix on Sunday. "I picked up some front wing damage in the middle with three cars kind of having their incident in front of me and I didn't have anywhere to go, which was unfortunate, and our pace wasn't great.

"Anyway, I'm looking forward to the next race. It's a home race for the team and I've got some new parts on my car, which I'm very much looking forward to. We'll see what we can do next weekend," Piastri concluded.

McLaren team boss Andrea Stella summed the race up, he said: "It's been a positive result here in Spielberg. Not just the valuable points from Lando's P5 but also seeing the MCL60 fighting at the front

"That's good for the team and good for our fans," he added. "We know this track is a bit of a 'Lando-Special', and he was excellent again today, but certainly some of this result is down to the upgraded aerodynamic package fitted to his car.

"It's been a colossal amount of work at the factory to get this upgrade here, and a good effort at the track to get the performance out of it. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the people who made that happen, and I hope they're enjoying the result because they certainly deserve it.

"On Oscar's side, he fell out of contention after some unfortunate circumstances," Stella continued, "but we all appreciate the spirit with which he dug in and pushed hard in a race at the back of the field. It's characteristic of Oscar – and the whole team – and we'll take that going to our home race at Silverstone.

"We're focused on that now and hoping for a positive result at the British Grand Prix," the Italian concluded.