‘Piastri and Norris are driving for their future place at McLaren’

Before the 2024 season started we looked at the key driver rivalries that we expected to play out over the coming 12 months. There was plenty to get our teeth into: how would Lewis Hamilton deal with the growing confidence of his younger Mercedes team-mate George Russell, would Charles Leclerc cement his position as number one in the Ferrari garage over Carlos Sainz and could Daniel Ricciardo prove he still had it by competing with Yuki Tsunoda at what was then still RB?

All of those questions have been emphatically answered over the intervening season and a half. But the most intriguing one we posed back then is still playing out: which of McLaren’s two supremely gifted young drivers will assert themselves?

“Both Piastri and Norris are driving for their future place in the team”

It seems a near certainty that that question will reach its emphatic conclusion over the next six months and the stakes couldn’t be higher: a drivers’ world championship beckons for the winner. But as Edd Straw contends in his brilliant analysis of the intra-team dynamics in this issue, there is arguably more riding on the outcome than ‘just’ the 2025 championship – if as seems likely it comes to that. Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris are driving for their future place in the team for, as we have seen many times before and despite both drivers having long contracts with the team, whoever comes off second-best may well find that after such a long struggle of wills, settling for second place in the Papaya pecking order is simply not an option.

And as is so often the case in top level sport the deciding factor will probably not come down to driving technique or car set-up but to the psychological response to the extreme pressure both drivers are under which will manifest itself in critical decisions on track and reactions to the inevitable setbacks that are to come. And while a simple reductive comparison between the two personas – an ‘ice-cool Piastri’ and more emotional Norris – may be oversimplifying things there is more than a grain of truth in the caricature. In many ways that is the magic of sport in general and Formula 1 in particular: at its best it manages to distil universal truths that we all experience in everyday life and can relate to into split-second moments of almost unbearable intensity.

Whatever the outcome, seeing the high-stakes drama play out over the course of the second half of the season is going to be a white-knuckle ride.

Joe Dunn, editor
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