Over the first 10 rounds of 2025 Oscar Piastri has established himself as the driver to beat within McLaren and must be considered the favourite to win the championship.
But why, after two years of trailing his team mate Lando Norris, has Piastri now pulled ahead? There are two competing explanations.
One is, rather obviously, the fact that Piastri only made his Formula 1 debut two years ago and the experience he had accumulated during that time has paid off. There is clearly an element of that at work.
For example, the gap between Piastri and Norris in qualifying at some tracks has gradually swung in his favour from year to year. He was four tenths of a second slower than Norris in qualifying on his grand prix debut in Bahrain, almost matched him at the same circuit a year later, and was four tenths of a second faster the year after that.
Left: Piastri ahead; right: Norris ahead. Unrepresentative comparisons omitted
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Of course the changes in lap time are not as smooth and obvious as this at every circuit. If so, Piastri’s overall qualifying performance would have been better in 2024 than 2023, which wasn’t the case: He lost 15-7 to Norris in his debut season and that gap widened to 20-4 last year.
In his third season, however, Piastri has clearly hit his stride. He currently leads Norris by six to four in qualifying.
The pendulum has clearly swung. McLaren team principal Andrea Stella believes the main reason for this is the progress made by Piastri and his side of the garage since last year.
“I think the most important improvement, if anything, is that Oscar has become a faster driver,” he explained. “I think when you are a faster driver then you have more opportunity, more time to process, more bandwidth to process things.
“This is true when you are in the car and this is also true when you are outside the car. Because the speed is there [it] lets [you] process all the other marginal gains that will then, at the end of the weekend, constitute the performance that you need to have the kind of results that he’s having at the moment.
“In addition to that, over the winter, there’s been a very specific amount of work that has paid attention to different areas. It’s been quite holistic.
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Positive: Norris ahead; negative: Piastri ahead. Unrepresentative comparisons omitted
“While Oscar is definitely the main one to praise for these developments, I would like to mention the team around Oscar – his engineers and all the support from the factory with all the analysis. And even the team, Mark Webber, who works with Oscar, he’s definitely a great source of thoughts, insight and identification of opportunities.
“So, there’s quite a lot of work behind this progress. But ultimately, hats off to Oscar who has been able to capitalise.”
But while one McLaren driver has clearly found gains during the off-season, the other has been markedly less confident. Since the season began Norris has complained about feeling less confident in McLaren’s latest car than he has in previous seasons.
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He has made noticeably more errors in qualifying, particularly in the decisive Q3 session, which has often left him at a disadvantage on race day. Attempts to address this in Canada did not appear to pay off.
Norris was the only one of McLaren’s drivers to run their new suspension layout. “I had the option to run it but chose not to,” Piastri explained.
“I’ve been happy with how the car’s been so far this year and, again, just wanted to keep consistency.” Norris has clearly not been as happy with his feel from the car, but switching to the new suspension did not seem to help matters.
The weekend followed a depressingly familiar pattern for Norris. He was quickest in final practice, led Q1 and was just two hundredths of a second off the pace in Q2. But come Q3 he made a pair of mistakes and slumped to seventh on the grid.
As Norris set his best time on a set of tyres which had already done a lap, Piastri out-qualified him by over half a second. Piastri has only come out ahead by more than that twice: In Azerbaijan last year, when his team mate caught a yellow flag with unfortunate timing, and at the 2023 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, when Norris damaged his car.
Norris’s qualifying disappointment last weekend proved the starting point for a new low in his 2025 season. He chased Piastri hard during the race but took himself out by running into the back of the other McLaren in a badly misjudged move which had no chance of success.
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Rebounding from that will undoubtedly be difficult for Norris. He is far from out of it yet: he is only 22 points behind his team mate and his race pace has consistently been a match for Piastri’s.
But if Piastri maintains his recent superiority in qualifying, Norris’s championship hopes look set to gradually fade over the summer months.
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2025 Canadian Grand Prix
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