Lando Norris, Oscar Piastri, McLaren, Albert Park, 2025

Over the final 16 rounds of 2024, Oscar Piastri only out-qualified his team mate once.

How Lando Norris must have been pining for a return to those days after qualifying for the Canadian Grand Prix, where Piastri put him 6-4 down.

This was the stage in the season where it seemed Piastri, in his third season as a Formula 1 driver, had put his more experienced team mate in his mirrors. He didn’t only have more wins than Norris over the season up to that point (5-2) but over their careers (7-6).

The nadir of Norris’s season followed in the grand prix, where after several unsuccessful attempts to pass Piastri he finally tagged his team mate’s car and was fortunate to only take himself out.

Wins in the next two rounds put Norris back on the path to the championship. He was fortunate McLaren operated a strict, sometimes opaque policy of equality towards both drivers, particularly at Monza, where it handed him three points he would otherwise have lost. Other teams would not have gambled so long on a Safety Car which never came, nor acted to ‘correct’ the delay Norris suffered when he pitted.

Piastri’s performances dipped over the following races, prompting the usual tedious conspiracy theories that he was being sabotaged by McLaren or some other such nonsense. If anything, Piastri seemed far less bothered by the events of Monza than Singapore, where Norris forcefully passed him on the first lap, causing contact which provoked a reaction by McLaren.

While Norris stumbled too often early in the season, Piastri buckled in the later races. Baku was a bizarre off-weekend (which served to deflect attention from how poor Norris’s was), while crashes in the Austin and Interlagos sprint races also proved costly.

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But even when Norris regained the championship lead it wasn’t a one-way street at McLaren. Piastri was positively imperious in Losail and only McLaren’s strategy blunder cost him a victory and a fighting shot at the title in Yas Marina.

No doubt Piastri’s deep disappointment at leading the championship for six months only to lose it will not be assuaged by reflecting on how his 2025 campaign marked a clear improvement over what had already been a successful start to life in F1. Still, it bears pointing out.

In 2023, Piastri led Norris home in just four out of 18 two-car finishes for McLaren. He improved to eight in 24 last year. This year they were virtually level: Piastri led Norris home in 10 of the 22 grands prix where both were classified (the other two being his Baku crash and Las Vegas, where both were disqualified after Piastri finished behind). Perhaps even more significantly, Piastri’s qualifying score was much better, improving from 20-4 down to 13-11.

If the pair remain at this level, we’re going to hear a lot more about McLaren’s ‘papaya rules’ over the coming seasons. But if Piastri has more room to grow than Norris – and his F1 career is four years younger – then 2025 may prove a snapshot of a pendulum swinging from one side of the McLaren garage to the other.

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Unrepresentative comparisons omitted. Negative value: Norris was faster; Positive value: Piastri was faster

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