Great debate: Will Piastri be Norris’s biggest problem in 2025?

No, it will be Lando Norris… - Ben Hunt

The Lando Norris/Oscar Piastri relationship was one of the many intriguing factors that McLaren was required to manage last season and it did so with varying success. The somewhat embarrassing pleas for Norris to surrender the lead of the Hungarian Grand Prix were a flash point, so too the faintest coming together in the Italian GP. But on both occasions the situation was managed enough to get the desired outcome – the constructors’ title. There was also the time when Norris defied his team’s orders and handed Piastri victory in the Qatar GP sprint race. It was all fairly amicable.

Norris finished the season adamant that 2025 was “going to be his year” and indeed he might be right. But the biggest threat to his title challenge will not come from his McLaren team-mate, but from himself.

Norris has been widely accused of failing to perform under pressure, with those pointing out that he has an unwelcome ability not to capitalise when starting on pole. This is an opinion Norris rejects, and in turn he can point out how he delivered in the most pressurised of situations in Abu Dhabi last year to win the race and clinch McLaren’s constructors’ crown.

The biggest challenge therefore is not Piastri or indeed the pressure, but his mentality when he goes up against Max Verstappen. We saw in Austria 2024 how the two collided and Norris was angry afterwards. But that mood quickly dissipated and he patched things up with Verstappen. Had he harnessed that fire he could have perhaps used it to his benefit. Norris says he knows he needs a change in mentality if he is to win the title. No more Mr Nice Guy, he simply has to be more ruthless. The problem is, I don’t know if that streak is within his nature.

Yes, along with his management - Stuart Codling

That Oscar is a cool customer is in no doubt. If he were any more laid back he wouldn’t be able to see over the top of his steering wheel. The likelihood of him throwing tantrums over unequal treatment, or having to give way to his team-mate, is low. Ditto the probability of him getting involved in political games. He also has the presence of mind to assume nothing, and to prepare himself for the coming season in the best way possible: that is, to ally his great speed to better tyre management and more consistency in qualifying.

The problem will come if he establishes an early lead over his team-mate, at which point ‘papaya rules’ will quickly become moot if McLaren wants to claim both world championships. The lessons are clear from Williams in 1986, or indeed McLaren in 2007. If you don’t pick a point where one team-mate gets priority, the danger is they take points off each other and someone else sweeps in to snatch the prize.

Should Norris open a points lead, even if Piastri’s inclination is to play nice, his management will be urging him not to. As a driver, Mark Webber chafed against being cast as Sebastian Vettel’s supporting act at Red Bull. As Piastri’s Mr 10 Percent he’ll be equally driven to block such a scenario. The danger for McLaren is there are plenty of other teams who would willingly put in an offer, and Webber has shown through his extraction of Piastri from Alpine that he’s prepared to move fast and break things.

Who will come out on top at McLaren in 2025?

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No, you can’t forget the rest - Alex Kalinauckas

Sorry to live so relentlessly in the real world but, at this stage of the 2025 F1 campaign, there’s not enough evidence to suggest that just beating his excellent team-mate is Norris’s only hurdle to claiming a first drivers’ title. A multi-team scrap is not only predicted, but it could also well be a four-way battle for the first time in this generation.

OK, let’s first assume McLaren heads the pack and Norris and Piastri lock out the Albert Park front row. Whether he’s starting ahead or behind, Piastri’s ice-cool killer instinct will kick in – a potential first home hero Australian GP win since it joined the F1 calendar at stake in this scenario.

And, if an intra-team title tussle does come to pass, you can bet that Piastri will be out to ‘Monza’ Norris every chance he gets. Why would he not, when he did it even with the faintest of 2024 championship hopes?

I’m told that McLaren is already telling its staff not to view doing the double as holding any extra significance in 2025 to what it achieved with the constructors’ last year. It doesn’t want extra distractions. But Piastri has form in going against the grain, sending a warning in meeting Verstappen’s fire with his own determined flame in that Abu Dhabi crash, when McLaren was still yet to seal its first teams’ prize in 26 years.

But this all ignores the chances of Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton, Charles Leclerc and the Mercedes duo. Even if Norris is taking care of Piastri, the rest still must be dealt with too. Combined, they are an even bigger threat to Norris’s attempt to join the legends.

Yes, because Piastri is still getting better - Jake Boxall-Legge

My colleagues will likely have pointed to the areas where Piastri still lags in comparison to Norris, but what we need to look at is his rate of improvement versus Norris to gauge how much of a threat he’ll be. The usual bugbears attributed to Piastri are qualifying pace and tyre management, but these are both areas in which he showed tremendous growth from 2023 to 2024.

For pace differentials, let’s look at supertimes: a driver’s fastest time in relation to the best lap of a race weekend. This gives a picture of how frequently a driver can extract the full potential from a car, serving as a metric for their outright pace. The simplified figures are thus: Piastri was 0.227% slower on average versus Norris in 2023, and 0.159% slower in 2024. But this followed a trend of improvement over the 2024 season, where his percentage gap to Norris was 0.196% in the opening half of the year and 0.121% in the second half.

And tyre management? This is a bit harder to measure, but you can take the liberty of explaining that away with the idea that this skill improves with experience. Piastri is much more adept at coaxing his Pirellis through longer stints than his efforts in his rookie season, and a winter to evaluate that progress should mean he can maintain an extra couple of tenths per lap over a race distance. Assuming McLaren’s next car is another winner, he should make life very difficult for Norris.

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Who gets the upper hand in the opening rounds could set the tone for the all-McLaren battle

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