The changes Piastri made for F1 title showdown against Norris

We almost fail to notice our interview guest arrive at our secluded locale within McLaren’s Technology Centre. After being kindly invited into the abode of the reigning constructors’ champion, Autosport’s party of four has been guided through the labyrinthine bowels of the MTC and behind a hidden door to reach ‘The Spine’ – a dimly lit walkway usually reserved for the storage of any historical cars not on display at the indoor, lakeside Boulevard.  

As we set up cameras and lighting, and put the finishing gloss to our questions, Oscar Piastri’s arrival is almost unsighted. With McLaren press attache Harry Bull, he sneaks in through the back door and awaits the completion of the impromptu stage. Eventually, they’re beckoned over; producer Jason wants to affix the lavalier microphone to the title favourite and check his sound levels once it’s appended to his orange polo shirt. It’s showtime. Piastri takes his seat to talk shop one more time before starting a well-earned summer break. 

Unless something goes catastrophically awry for McLaren over the final stages of 2025, one of its drivers will be a first-time Formula 1 world champion at the end of the year. Either Piastri or Lando Norris will become the 35th driver in history to attain the drivers’ crown, with the sense that this is a battle that could be drawn out until the curtain-closer in Abu Dhabi. 

There’s been an ebb and flow to it throughout. Norris kicked off the year as he’d ended 2024, with victory in the Australia season-opener. This time, however, Piastri has been a much more formidable competitor to his team-mate. Now into his third year in F1, the Melburnian has outgrown his previous competitive strata to chalk up a series of dominant victories over the season thus far.  

It helps that both drivers have had 2025’s creme de la creme of automotive design bestowed upon them. The MCL39 has been a source of terror for McLaren’s immediate rivals, and the result of the design team’s relentless ambition to innovate under the direction of Andrea Stella. According to the Italian, the team was not content to win races – it wanted to create a car so effortlessly competitive that it could remove all doubt from any strategic 50-50 calls. Mission accomplished, at least so far.

And Piastri is grateful to have such potent machinery in his arsenal. As we start the interview, he’s keen to address the rarity of the situation in being equipped with such a strong car. 

Watch: Oscar Piastri Exclusive: From Rookie to F1 Title Contender in His Own Words

“It’s been a lot of fun,” he begins. “Firstly, it’s pretty rare that anyone gets this opportunity in their F1 career. I’ve been enjoying being able to fight for wins pretty much week in, week out. But it’s been a good year from a performance standpoint. I feel like I’ve made progress from my first two seasons in F1 and this year… I was developing my strengths in my first couple of years, and I feel like this year they’ve come together much more often. That’s been really satisfying for me. Fighting for race wins in F1 is pretty cool.”

Of those wins this year, Piastri picks Bahrain and Barcelona as his standouts, largely due to the swing in dominance that he enjoyed throughout those two weekends. At the Sakhir venue, he’d had the run of the place; when Norris fluffed qualifying, Piastri’s main job was to withstand an early attack from George Russell into the opening corners.  

Once the Briton’s overtures for the lead were evaded, the Australian had free rein to disappear into the night unchallenged. “It’s the one that I’m probably the most proud of,” Piastri enthuses. “It was just a really strong weekend from start to finish. Qualifying was strong, the race as well, we had a couple of safety cars thrown in, and we managed that well. I mean that was the biggest gap [15.5 seconds the final margin over Russell] that I had for the year [so far].” 

"You’re trying to be better in every way: whether that’s from a mental standpoint, physical standpoint, how I drive the car, how I get the most out of the team around me because we’re talking about such fine margins" Oscar Piastri

According to Piastri, the Spanish GP “was a similar kind of weekend”. This time, he’d had Norris on the front row with him – but his team-mate was caught in the throes of second-guessing himself off the line and left himself exposed to Max Verstappen at the start. Although the Dutchman stopped early and undercut both McLarens, he was working towards a three-stopper versus the pair of papaya two-stoppers. Therefore, once the tyre-swapping phases had shaken out, McLaren had covered off the 1-2. 

It’s easy to forget that Piastri gathered his breakthrough grand prix win a year ago, in a race complicated by McLaren’s muddled use of team orders. His second at Baku had developed through his mighty defence against Charles Leclerc (with a little help from McLaren’s ‘mini-DRS’) on the 1.4-mile Neftchilar Avenue run – in essence, these were close-run wins that Piastri had to round off at the chequered flag. Now he’s got the arsenal to do so, he’s started to put together the meat-and-drink displays of dominance that have underpinned many a championship win. And that’s a demonstration of his progress over the off-season. 

Meeting his 2025 targets: “I needed to find a bit extra” 

Ask any pundit through the latter half of 2023 and early part of 2024 where Piastri’s weaknesses versus Norris had lain, and the answer would probably address his perceived troubles in qualifying and in the domain of tyre management. Both areas appear to have been greatly improved upon this season; stretching out his C3 mediums for 32 laps at Spa demonstrated his progress in that facet.

In his first two F1 seasons, Piastri lacked a qualifying edge and tyre management skills to match Norris - tasks he has solved in 2025

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Ask the man himself, and Piastri has a different view; he reckons that he’d cracked the tyre management approach last year, and that – although he says he’s improved across the board – it’s primarily in qualifying where his stock has risen. 

“I felt like from 2023 to 2024, I took a pretty big step in tyre management,” he confirms. “But ultimately, there was still a few weekends where it wasn’t really tyre management anymore, it was just pace that I needed. And when you are lacking pace, the easiest way to try and make that up is in the high-speed corners, which is the worst for the tyres.  

“It looked a bit different last year, and on the weekends where I felt like I’d just had good underlying pace, that wasn’t a problem. But there still were those weekends every now and again where I needed to find a bit extra. I think just trying to find performance was the biggest thing in the off-season before this year.  I was trying to find that wherever we can in qualifying. I was making a lot of races more difficult than I wanted to last year, so trying to improve that has naturally made a lot of races look quite different to what I had last year.  

“It was a big focus point of ‘how do I improve that result?’. But obviously you can’t just go into it saying, ‘I’m going to qualify better this year.’ You need to work out how. That’s been a big focus, but I think a lot of the gains I’ve tried to make in chasing that have also transferred to race day as well.” 

And he’s right, in that a driver can’t attempt to simply manifest that improvement. An endless quest for self-improvement largely focuses on their reflection on past travails, hoping to uncover the secret of perpetual performance. The data holds many of the clues. From there, it’s up to the driver to work with their engineering team and adapt their driving to suit. 

There’s also the mental aspect to consider. Knowing how to dig that extra smidgen of time out of a lap is one thing; doing so – and in a repeatable fashion – is quite another challenge. “[The data] was kind of the main part of it because that’s where the science is and that’s where you can get behind it,” he begins. “But you’re trying to be better in every way: whether that’s from a mental standpoint, physical standpoint, how I drive the car, how I get the most out of the team around me because we’re talking about such fine margins, especially this year. 

“We’ve had so many qualifying sessions decided by less than a tenth that you really do need to try and get those hundredths from wherever you can. I’m trying to find it from everywhere. But obviously there was a lot of work with my engineers and the team around me to try and work out how I can ultimately drive faster.” 

Piastri has unlocked improvements with a lot of attention to detail on his data with his engineers

Photo by: Alastair Staley / LAT Images via Getty Images

And that driver-engineer relationship with Tom Stallard, formerly the in-car conscience that rested on the shoulders of Daniel Ricciardo and Carlos Sainz, is into its third season. Piastri has the comfort that he needs from it to make the big calls himself, but accepts that he can’t (and probably shouldn’t) go into absolute granular detail himself. 

F1 history is littered with drivers who overthought the set-up options and frustrated their engineers, proffering bee-in-bonnet ideas about the minutiae of which toe angles to run and the millimetre thickness between shims and bump-stops. Piastri says that the key part of the dyad with Stallard is in knowing what he can, and should, affect himself – and in which areas he should lean on his team of engineers.

“It’s good relationship that’s built and got stronger over the years,” he explains. “I think also for myself in kind of establishing how much power I have in that relationship and how much you know, how much I can dictate what I want. Coming from spec series, you can’t change much, you can’t influence that many things, you don’t have that much testing or practice time to try stuff. Then you get to F1, and you’ve got a lot of things you can change, a lot of things that you can kind of adjust to your own liking rather than just adapting straight to the car. So, it’s taken me a while to kind of finesse that and find exactly what I need from the car. And that changes a bit from year to year as well.

As McLaren has grown over the past two and a half years, Piastri has grown with it – which brings us today, where both driver and team now operate at the top of the food chain

“Tom gets a better understanding of what I need, and he can then fill in the blanks if I’m not sure. That relationship has evolved as well, and I think it’s at the strongest it’s ever been.” 

How Piastri and McLaren have grown together 

It would be an understatement to say that Piastri has explored the highs and lows of F1 life, and that was before he’d even made the step up as a race driver. Given that he’s so dyed-in-the-wool McLaren these days, his contractual contretemps with Alpine at the tail end of 2022 feels like a lifetime ago. This wasn’t a topic of our conversation, because there’s nothing more to be said about it: Piastri was neglected in his reserve role, McLaren signed him to a race seat, and Alpine attempted to promote him into the space vacated by Fernando Alonso. Thing is, Alpine’s terms sheet was not considered as a valid deal by F1’s Contracts Recognition Board, and so Piastri’s path to McLaren was cleared. Deal of the century for McLaren? Perhaps – either way, it was a catastrophic fumble by Piastri’s former employer. 

Of course, Piastri’s tenure at McLaren didn’t entirely start auspiciously, but this was linked to the difficulties that the team faced at the beginning of 2023. McLaren knew that it was in a tight spot with that year’s MCL60, the off-season underbody changes having unsettled its platform, but a dire Bahrain opener exposed the magnitude of its problems. A series of electrical glitches in Piastri’s debut race put him out of the reckoning after just 13 laps, having qualified a lowly 18th. 

Piastri endured a forgettable F1 debut as McLaren's car weaknesses were exposed at the start of 2023

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

This prompted McLaren, now under Stella’s leadership after Andreas Seidl had departed the team, to reorganise its engineering deck and reformulate the MCL60. After a series of small changes to raise the car’s baseline, McLaren then struck gold with its Austrian Grand Prix updates – which Norris pressed into service to finish fourth. When Piastri got those new parts at Silverstone, it was very clear that McLaren was now in the reckoning, not just for points but for regular podiums.  

As McLaren has grown over the past two and a half years, Piastri has grown with it – which brings us today, where both driver and team now operate at the top of the food chain. This year’s MCL39 might look like a logical development of 2024’s MCL38, but the overhaul in suspension packages and approach to kinematic detail has been a radical one.  

In the races, the MCL39 has been the class of the field. Such is its delicate touch with the tyres that another team had suggested it was using illicit means of keeping them cool, but the reality is that McLaren has focused on the detail of the aerodynamics around the wheel hub. This allows it to expel a greater deal of heat from the wheel assembly, ensuring that the car keeps its Pirellis in the working range. 

On his first experience with the car, Piastri felt only negligible differences to last year’s machine. He did note that it was harder to hold the car at the limit in qualifying, but anything he didn’t especially like in its handling over a single lap could be dialled out with set-up. Norris was different; due to the lack of feedback in the steering, he has favoured the new high-caster suspension package introduced at June’s Canadian GP that offers a little more self-aligning torque at the front end. In effect, this is just a set-up difference between the two drivers. Piastri felt he could handle the initial feeling of the car, so he’s persisted with that suspension geometry. Although he’s offered that explanation before, it’s not stopped people asking him about it – so hopefully this clears it up. 

“In testing in Bahrain we had some concerns, not necessarily the steering or the front suspension, but just the car was very tricky to drive on the limit in testing,” he remembers. “Our race runs were always very strong, but in the qualifying sims we were genuinely struggling. We had a lot of work to do to try and unlock that. 

“I think you’ve still seen episodes of that through the year: Canada for example, a few other tracks where it has been quite difficult to drive on the limit and that’s probably been the thing we’ve been most vocal about, partly because everything else has been so good.

“I’ve not really struggled with that feeling or sensation. We’ve tried different things with the front suspension to see if it changes much. But for me I’ve been pretty happy with how it’s been. It’s not been a big concern, but definitely I still shared initially anyway the kind of same feelings about the car being pretty difficult to drive in some conditions. I think we’ve done a much better job of addressing that with set-up, and expectations and getting used to the car more. But there’s not really a specific trait that I don’t like anymore.” 

Piastri has enjoyed a fierce but fair fight with Norris for the F1 title so far

Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images

Piastri vs Norris: A Grand Slam final 

McLaren has simultaneously the nicest, yet most difficult, problem to deal with in navigating two different drivers’ title bids. It’s like charting two courses for two explorers to reach the promise of treasure but, individually, it’s up to them to follow it – and the team remains inextricably linked to both fortunes. 

The McLaren operation has been open to chopping and changing strategies on the fly – effectively giving each side of the garage licence to operate as an independent race team. It’s a bold but refreshing take on the intra-team battle; in the past, the likes of Mercedes in the Lewis Hamilton-Nico Rosberg days would give both drivers the same strategy to ward off any accusations of bias. But one rigid strategy always works out better for one driver than the other… 

Perhaps McLaren feels confident that the driver who loses the title battle will take a conciliatory stance towards their own strategies. Managing the healthy rivalry with an open team culture appears to be doing the job, and that’s arguably down to the nature of both drivers. However you dissect the two-way battle between Piastri and Norris, it has nonetheless remained cordial. It can become fierce on the circuit, sure, but crucially retains that undercurrent of respect away from it.  

Even if their on-track rivalry strays beyond the realms of cordiality, the off-track respect between Piastri and Norris should remain unruffled. It’s just not either driver’s style to kindle the fires of internecine warfare

How does it compare to McLaren drivers of yore? While Piastri has unwittingly cultivated the Alain Prost comparison, Norris doesn’t fit the implied Ayrton Senna mould. The Bristolian does not operate with an all-or-nothing approach; rather, he’s someone who would have very real qualms about that style of racing.

Prost-Lauda? Not quite. To this writer’s mind, their rivalry doesn’t equate to one seen before in F1 – but in tennis; surely, the early-to-mid 1990s duopoly of Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi is a more fitting allegory. One, a serene force on the court with a huge serve and distinct penchant for a serve-and-volley game, the other a baseliner who can return those serves and with a killer backhand. 

Think Sampras prowling between the service box and the baseline between each point: head slightly bowed, expression imperceptible aside from a half-cocked left lip corner as he plotted his next ‘Pistol Pete’ serve. There was a prevailing calmness to Sampras, a trait that corresponds to Piastri’s general demeanour. By comparison, Agassi was the more emotional player of the two, one who professed to hate tennis and certainly found himself (in his early career, at least) more prone to self-doubt and self-destruction. Both went from fighting to become America’s number-one player to battling for Grand Slam titles – just as McLaren’s drivers take their intra-team battle to a grander stage.  

The Australian deep in conversation with Boxall-Legge

Photo by: JEP

Sampras was the more successful player, although Agassi had the greater longevity and won all four majors: the French Open a notable omission in the former’s trophy cabinet. You suspect that, even if their on-track rivalry strays beyond the realms of cordiality, the off-track respect between Piastri and Norris should remain unruffled. It’s just not either driver’s style to kindle the fires of internecine warfare. 

Managing a title? It’s not Piastri’s first rodeo 

Success at a junior level isn’t the be-all and end-all to performing well in F1, but Piastri notes that there’s a bit of overlap between fighting for a championship at a lower rung of the ladder and fighting for one at the top level. Never mind F1’s position in the global sports stratosphere, Piastri reckons that the basics are essentially the same. 

“In a lot of ways, it feels pretty similar to championships I’ve raced for in the past,” he says. “I think for me the big difference is this is the first time I’ve really raced a team-mate so hard for a championship. [At lower levels] there’s no pitstops, there’s no strategy, it’s purely just go out and try and beat each other and finish ahead of each other.  

“In F1 you’ve got the added complication of strategy. You’ve got a bunch of different things that can influence results. That’s been quite a different dynamic in some ways and has put a lot of importance on certain things: being ahead before the pitstops, taking risks at a certain point, not taking risks. That’s been quite a different mentality in some ways, but ultimately the position I’m in feels very familiar trying to secure a championship.” 

We put the idea of “taking the season race by race” to him, simply because it’s a maxim that has been often trotted out by a driver at the business end of the season. He happily accepts that it is a cliche in racing circles, but there’s a reason it’s such a trite phrase: it works. 

When you consider how to win a championship, you sense that there’s an idea of management: do you settle for the 18 points on offer for second, or take a risk and upgrade it to 25, knowing that you could very realistically score zero? It must be tempting to run the numbers, but Piastri reckons that spending time worrying about the outcome of the Abu Dhabi finale is not energy well spent. 

And while he doesn’t say it overtly, Piastri presents this situation in a way that isn’t binary: a driver can still take a risk and go for the win without throwing all their chips on the table: “Taking it race by race: it sounds boring, and kind of is boring in some ways, but it is very true. You can’t worry about what’s going to happen in Abu Dhabi and take your focus off what you’re doing in the weekend, especially at the top of F1. You’ve got to be on top of your game every single time and any focus you kind of take away from that, means you’re not at the top of your game.” 

And that’s the Piastri way. Drive fast. Race hard. But be sensible about it.

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the October 2025 issue and subscribe today.

Who will capture the F1 title come Abu Dhabi?

Photo by: JEP