The "huge advantage" Norris and Piastri are creating for McLaren in F1 2025

Formula 1 2025’s infancy has a feel-good factor. It’s not quite 2024 – which contained Carlos Sainz's appendicitis operation recovery win, Lando Norris's Miami breakthrough and Charles Leclerc's home Monaco triumph – but it's there.

You can feel it in the paddock. In George Russell’s playful suggestion that, while McLaren has the potential to win all 24 grand prix races this term, it likely won’t because the orange team is early in its dominant phase. Remember here how Red Bull let victories go begging to Mercedes in 2021 (such as Spain) and Ferrari in 2022 (with its early car design weight issue).

So many people recognised the significance of Lewis Hamilton’s first ‘win’ for Ferrari in the Shanghai sprint. The front of the grid was packed with paddock personnel wanting to glimpse a moment of upcoming history. Yet the fact it was “only a sprint” – a view Hamilton shares – produced many a wry follow up…

But, perhaps most notably last weekend, the positivity shone most strongly in something Norris didn’t say following Oscar Piastri’s Chinese Grand Prix victory from a first career pole position.

After losing his chance to mount a late attack on his team-mate using the tyres he’d saved for the race’s final phase – Piastri driving likewise a few seconds up the road – to that worsening brake problem, Norris could’ve churlishly stuck the boot in post-race.

He could've moaned, could've outright suggested he lost victory, could’ve embarrassed McLaren on the occasion of its 50th F1 1-2 result (only the second for this line-up after Hungary 2024, where Piastri also finished ahead and in those memorably awkward team orders circumstances). But Norris refrained.

“It doesn't matter now, really, does it?” Norris said after climbing from his MCL39 to speak to ex-F1 tester and sportscar/Formula E racer Ho-Pin Tung in parc ferme. “It doesn't matter. He deserved the win and he drove very well all weekend. So, I'm happy with second.”

PLUS: Could Norris have won Piastri's Chinese GP without McLaren's late brake issue?

Norris’s status as a driver long raised at McLaren has already massively paid the team back for its investment in him over the years. Here was another example.

At this early stage of the year, all seems rosy in a winning McLaren camp

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images

The McLaren team orders topic is a thorny one for the squad. You can sense team principal Andrea Stella’s inward exasperation at being asked about it time and again even when McLaren has dominated a race – as was the case in both Melbourne and Shanghai during his regular briefings with the F1 press corps. His responses, however, continue to be classy.

Now, there have been suggestions in some quarters that Norris’s Shanghai brake issue was too convenient. In that it avoided an intra-McLaren battle for the victory it’d long secured against Russell’s Mercedes.

This is nonsense. Norris could feel this issue – albeit long after McLaren had spotted it arising in his car’s telemetry data with around half the 56-lap contest remaining – and he reported it to race engineer Will Joseph. He adapted his driving and was even able to press on in the late stages of the race, where lap times were getting ever quicker as the new track surface gripped up with all the added rubber going down.

“Apart from Ferrari, I don’t think there’s another team that has two drivers that push each other anywhere near as much” Lando Norris

Stella said the key was for Norris to avoid hitting peak brake pressure at Turns 6 and 14, but the data also shows by the final few laps – when Norris felt the issue was “accelerating in deterioration” and “got critical in the last five laps” – he was lifting-and-coasting several hundred metres before every major braking zone.

McLaren’s successful start to 2025 highlights how refreshing F1 finds it when periods of domination are ended. We’ll get to why this one is already much better than the last, but perhaps one big factor in the current feel-good feeling is the absence of scandal compared to this time a year ago. Although, if it jettisons Liam Lawson after just two races, Red Bull will be at the centre of another one of a different kind…

Returning to the totally tangible, it’s the burgeoning title fight between two engaging McLaren drivers that has got people excited. In winning as he did in Shanghai, having also recovered to second in Hamilton’s sprint win, Piastri erased almost all his Melbourne misfortune with what he told me was his “most complete” weekend in F1 so far. And just his 48th, after all.

Norris went from looking supreme in Melbourne to appearing far off his team-mate for most of round two. But this had far more to do with the Shanghai track’s front-limited nature exposing issues with the car he’s been feeling since Bahrain testing.

Smooth driving style earned Piastri the edge in China

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Early in the weekend, the new track surface had returned Shanghai’s severe front graining that 2024’s bitumen-heavy paint covering had obscured. Therefore, the understeer through the track’s many long corners was hampering Norris more – as his driving style is higher energy than the smoother Piastri. This further loads the fronts already under massive strain here. The new surface also meant higher corner entry speeds and raised front tyre pressures, which further exacerbated the tyre challenge.

The track gripping up as the weekend progressed helped Norris, but Stella revealed he could “pick up something from Oscar” who was “having less graining than Lando”. Comparing Norris’s driving where he struggled to eighth in the sprint, to his long chase in the GP, reveals he adapted to brake slightly later, but also then give it a fraction longer before hitting the gas to aid tyre life, for the second and more important contest.

“Probably apart from Ferrari, I don’t think there’s another team that has two drivers that push each other anywhere near as much,” Norris said, when this writer put Stella’s point about the two McLaren drivers helping each other get even better to them in the post-GP press conference. “And for us, that’s a huge advantage. Even if you have the same car for everyone, if you have a team with two drivers who can push each other, they’re always going to beat everyone else that’s just on their own.

“So, we have a great car, we have a great team, but we also have two drivers that are pushing each other more than any other team has. And that will always triumph - even [over] the best driver on the grid. That’s one of our biggest strengths at the minute, how we’re able to learn from each other.

“Because of what Oscar said: we have different ways we drive. He wants some things on the car, I want different things. But normally our ways align and we always want the same thing in the end. Oscar’s ability to adapt to a track like this was impressive, and something I clearly struggled a lot more to do.”

F1 heads next to Suzuka and another circuit that demands heavy tyre management. However, this is rather more rear limited, so - in theory - McLaren should better blow the opposition away based on evidence of how only the orange cars were able to retain decent tyre life in the third sector of Melbourne qualifying. This added up to a near 0.4-second gap to Norris’s pole over Max Verstappen in another recalcitrant Red Bull.

Piastri pushed his team-mate close there, but the early lessons from the opening rounds suggest this will be an epic title battle that ebbs and flows across the year – with track type having a major impact on race result for the two McLaren stars.

Adapting to areas where before they have been weak could well determine which of this pair wins the 2025 title, if the two-horse race is sustained. That Norris and Piastri are currently getting along famously could still yet be the calm before the storm. But that they’re so close in terms of performance bodes so well for this campaign, overall. The monotony of 2023 it is not. And F1 fans should rejoice that’s the case.

McLaren has started the season with a substantial advantage over its rivals

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images