Why Norris must act now to halt Piastri's championship momentum

“Robust” is how McLaren team principal Andrea Stella described Oscar Piastri’s almost disdainful journey from pole position to victory in Bahrain.

The Italian engineer was speaking in his second language, and you feel he could have been deploying that adjective not just in the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “strong and hardy”, but in the sense of one of those Latinate coffee brews that arrives short, viscous and potent, delivering an almost electrical jolt behind the eyeballs.

“If we think about Oscar’s win in Baku [last season], this was a pretty clinical victory,” Stella mused when asked if this was Piastri’s best performance so far in his 50-grand prix career. “One with [Charles] Leclerc attacking him every single lap.

“For me this is the one in which, I think, he has been most robust. No hesitations, no inaccuracies, everything that was available he capitalised on. The Baku race was under pressure, this was more about managing gaps.”

Having been bettered at venues where he had the upper hand over Piastri last season, Lando Norris will be seeing a trend line emerging that is heading on a disquieting trajectory.

PLUS: Why Piastri was unassailable even without Norris' bumpy path at the Bahrain GP

Piastri was neat when it counted on Saturday and duly lined up on the best starting position possible. His cause was aided by George Russell losing his second-place grid spot to a penalty, and the driver who inherited it – Leclerc – starting on medium-compound Pirellis rather than scrubbed softs.

Having dealt with the challenge at Turn 1 of a fast-starting Russell, Piastri managed the race thereafter and had the advantage of clean air in which to do so. In contrast, Norris had given himself far more work to complete, owing to a scrappy qualifying lap that consigned him to sixth on the grid.

Piastri dealt with the threats off the line and looked unassailable after that

Photo by: Peter Fox - Getty Images

From there, all other inputs being equal, Norris was never going to win this race and second place was the best outcome he could obtain. The reasons he didn’t make it that far bear examination, since that will be a focus in McLaren’s debrief.

Norris added to his burden before the lights went out by allowing his front wheels to roll beyond the white lines demarcating his starting position. “I just misjudged it,” he explained later.

“I was too far back, so I tried to creep forward, and I did the opposite,” he said in the post-race press conference. “It’s the first time I’ve ever done this in my life, it shouldn’t happen but it did – and I paid the price for it.”

There was more wake turbulence to deal with as Norris made slightly heavy weather of catching and passing Leclerc and then challenging Russell, despite the advantage of being on the theoretically better medium tyres

This was no time to be thinking outside the box, as it were. The small error proved costly since it undid the effects of an excellent start as he vaulted to third place on the opening lap, the job of reaching P2 seemingly almost done until the gaffe came to light.

Nothing escapes Max Verstappen’s attention and he had already blown the whistle over his team radio. The timing sensors had likely made this clear to race control already but it did no harm for Max to perform the equivalent of a theatrical cough and an arch of the eyebrow.

Incurring a five-second penalty, to be served at his pitstop, proved to be another tipping point since it steered Norris into stopping earlier than the other frontrunners – the end of lap 10 – and then pushing harder at the beginning of his second stint to compensate for the time loss.

The safety car scuppered any chance of Ferrari taking advantage of its alternative tyre strategy

Photo by: Giuseppe Cacace - AFP - Getty Images

Ferrari never got to launch its planned attack on soft tyres in the final stint, owing to a contretemps in the lower reaches of the top 10. Yuki Tsunoda was caught out by one of the Red Bull RB21’s inveterate oversteer twitches at Turn 1 while dispatching Carlos Sainz’s Williams, and Sainz received a thump in the sidepod for his trouble.

The ensuing safety car deployment on lap 32 to enable the debris to be swept away came too early for Ferrari’s risk appetite. Having run both cars on mediums in the first two stints its only other option was the hards, which proved the least desirable of the three compounds on offer.

Or, in the rather pithier words of Lewis Hamilton, “These tyres suck.”

But, in the moments after the restart, all this lay in the future. Mercedes had elected to take on the risk of soft tyres and Russell had a look around the outside of Piastri before deciding that a stab at glory here might yield ignominy later if he took too much out of the tyres too soon.

“I thought about it,” Russell said in the pre-podium ‘green room’.

“I saw,” was Piastri’s typically cool response.

Hamilton did make a lunge and got by Norris, who retook the position – fourth at the time – at Turn 4, only to stray beyond the track limits and have to give it back, then do the job again (but better). As Norris laboured to pass Hamilton, the leading trio began to scamper clear, giving Lando more to do once he was out of the Ferrari’s ‘dirty air’.

There was more wake turbulence to deal with as Norris made slightly heavy weather of catching and passing Leclerc and then challenging Russell, despite the advantage of being on the theoretically better medium tyres. Unlike its rivals, McLaren had saved two sets of these ahead of the race but Norris was unable to extract maximum gain.

Norris couldn't find a way to overtake a limping Russell late on

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Given that Russell was managing technical issues, and these were in the public domain since he was discussing them over the radio, this will be particularly galling.

My colleagues back home watching on Sky Sports F1 reported that Martin Brundle was sternly critical of Norris’s racecraft in this phase of the grand prix. Members of the opinionati recently arrived in the world of F1 fandom might browse Brundle’s Wikipedia entry and sneer that he won rather fewer grand prix than Norris, and is therefore unqualified to sit in judgement.

But Brundle is a driver who has been there, done that, in an uglier midfield and in a somewhat harder-edged epoch. At Tyrrell, in a time when lap times were recorded on the team boss’s wife's stopwatch rather than a labyrinthine, circuit-wide network of sensors, Brundle could expect a rollocking from Ken Tyrrell if he lost too many fractions moving over to let faster cars through.

Still, who needs a dressing-down from the boss when you’re Norris, the most self-excoriating driver on the grid?

“It’s complicated. I’m not doubting myself, even though sometimes it may seem like that. It’s just something is not gelling. Something is not clicking” Lando Norris

“Every time I did one thing good, I did two things bad,” said Norris. “I just kept stopping myself from making as much progress as I should have done today.”

The nattering nabobs have a tendency to read too much into Norris’s heart-on-sleeve honesty, viewing it is a sign of weakness. Those close to him say the opposite, that he is merely thinking out loud, and that other drivers internalise such angst while outwardly blaming everybody but themselves.

Both McLaren drivers have played down the team’s dominance and poured cold water upon the significance of the opening rounds on the championship picture. And yet that trend line continues to deviate from a finishing point at which Norris is crowned champion. He needs to swing the momentum back his way.

Norris has appeared dejected and baffled by his current struggles

Photo by: Peter Fox - Getty Images

Norris has spoken of needing to “reset” and form a better working relationship with the car, but struggles to articulate how he will do that.

“I wish I knew the answer,” he said when my Motorsport.com colleague Fil Cleeren asked what such a reset might entail. “I don’t know if I have an answer, even for myself – whether or not I would share it with you guys, I don’t know.

“When you’re an athlete, when you’re a driver, you just know when things click. When you feel confident, when you feel comfortable.

“I’m confident that I have everything I need and I’ve got what it takes. I have no doubt about that, that I’m good enough and all of those things.

“But something is just not clicking with me in the car. I’m not able to do any of the laps like I was doing last season. There I knew every single corner, everything that was going to happen with the car, how it was going to happen. I felt on top of the car.

“It’s complicated. I’m not doubting myself, even though sometimes it may seem like that. It’s just something is not gelling. Something is not clicking. Therefore I don’t feel comfortable when I’m in the car. I’m confident I know I’ve got what it takes, just not confident in the car.

“And when you’re not confident in the car to know what the limit is, what to do in the slow-speed, high-speed corners, I'm never going to be as quick as I need to be, especially when you’re fighting the best in the world.”

Norris must act soon to prevent Piastri from romping clear

Photo by: Mario Renzi - Formula 1 - Getty Images