Autobayng News Team
The Dutch Grand Prix is likely to prove a pivotal moment in this year’s world championship fight.
Lando Norris had the pace to stay in touch with his race-leading team mate Oscar Piastri, but never threatened to pass him. As the race neared its end, Norris increasingly looked resigned to losing seven points to his championship rival.
This would not have been a disaster. Norris was heading towards a 16-point deficit with 249 points left to play for. Then came a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky: Norris reported smoke in his cockpit and moments later his MCL39 ground to a halt.
Today’s Formula 1 cars are so reliable that a retirement due to a sudden technical failure is unusual for any team. Even so, McLaren’s reliability has been exemplary: This was the first time either of their cars has stopped due to a technical fault since Piastri’s debut two-and-a-half years ago.
That will come as no consolation to Norris, of course, whose points deficit to Piastri effectively doubled as he climbed out of his cockpit. Piastri now has a 34-point lead, the largest margin either driver has enjoyed all year. It moves him past the symbolic threshold of 25 points, putting him in the comfortable position of knowing he has a buffer equivalent to a grand prix victory over his team mate.
The timing was particularly tough for Norris, who had clawed his way back into contention since his nadir moment in Canada, when he took himself out by colliding with Piastri. With three wins over the following four rounds he trimmed Piastri’s points lead back to single-digits.
For McLaren, this was the very definition of a ‘bittersweet’ result. Norris’s late retirement robbed them of a fifth consecutive one-two; Piastri’s victory came with the gut-punch of seeing their other car smoking at the roadside.
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Norris’s retirement is no concern for their virtually unassailable position in the constructors’ championship. McLaren have long been in the enviable position of knowing the drivers’ title is more than likely to go to one of their two racers.
The team has been scrupulously fair about giving their drivers an equal opportunity to compete, rather than issuing “hold position” orders to dully follow each other home from race to race. But this has been tested at times.
McLaren were ready for the possibility at the very first race. In Melbourne they temporarily called off the on-track fight between Norris and Piastri as they lapped backmarkers in tricky conditions, then allowed them to race again.
Piastri tried his luck at Silverstone when race control issued him a contentious penalty for slowing excessively in front of Max Verstappen at the end of a Safety Car period. He optimistically suggested the team cancel out the effect of the penalty by letting him back in front of Norris after he served it, but the pit wall wasn’t having it.
The team has continued to let its drivers fight even when they risked colliding with each other. This has happened once so far: Norris spent several laps trying to pass Piastri in Canada before finally making contact in an incident which could have eliminated both drivers.
Even so, McLaren continued to let them race. At the next round in Austria, Piastri made a desperate attempt to dive down the inside of his team mate to seize the initiative before their pit stops, locking his brakes at turn four. McLaren warned him not to take as great a risk again. A similar situation played out in Hungary, where Norris took the lead by running a different strategy, and Piastri’s efforts to wrest the lead from him were frustrated.
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It’s not a given that any team will hire the best two drivers available to it, then allow them to fight for supremacy on track with almost no interference from the pit wall. The current championship situation contrasts sharply with that of two years ago, when Red Bull were no less dominant and Max Verstappen won the drivers’ title with more than twice as many points as his team mate.
McLaren’s determination to allow their drivers to fight each other risks not only collisions but missed opportunities. That was clear last year when Norris’s attempt to catch Verstappen in the championship was frustrated by occasions when he lost points to Piastri. McLaren left it late in the season to fully get behind Norris’s title bid.
The team has been so far ahead this year that largely hasn’t been a concern. Nonetheless they deserve credit for allowing a ‘gloves off’ fight between the two drivers.
But Sunday’s race gave a reminder that this alone will not ensure each of them gets an equal opportunity. Luck can still intervene, and it did for Norris on lap 65. It remains to be seen whether it will have a further effect on the championship by forcing him to use an extra power unit and incurring a grid penalty.
Before Zandvoort, Norris was gradually making the case that he deserved to win the championship every bit as much as Piastri did. Now that misfortune has intervened in the championship fight at McLaren he will have to overwhelmingly demonstrate he’s more than a match for his team mate to take the title.
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2025 Dutch Grand Prix
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- McLaren reminded they can’t control everything in quest for a fair title fight
- Racing Bulls accuse Sainz of costing Lawson fifth place by “crashing into him”
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- Piastri’s points gap not “comfortable” yet despite Dutch GP boost
