Oscar Piastri or Lando Norris? Unless Max Verstappen pulls off an Alain Prost 1986-style miracle, this year’s world championship battle will answer that question. The Australian seized the initiative in the early months of the season, deposing his more experienced team-mate as title favourite as the narrative increasingly became one of the ‘granite’ Aussie asserting himself over a brittle adversary. That might foreshadow the story of the whole 2025 season, but it’s far from a done deal despite Piastri tilting the playing field in his favour with his performances.

Piastri has unequivocally been the stronger McLaren driver so far in 2025. He’s eradicated the question marks that hung over him during the winter after his 2024 campaign trailed off somewhat following his second victory, in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, thanks to vastly improved consistency. Piastri knew what he needed to do, explaining at McLaren’s launch in February that an improvement in what he called resilience was required.

“It’s building up the resilience to be able to adapt a bit quicker in the weekends,” said Piastri. “Effectively, if the weekend started bad, in those weekends it was difficult, especially if it was a sprint weekend, to make progress towards the front. We’ve gone into a lot of detail on how we can be better prepared and some of the more specific driving opportunities.”

He’s delivered on that spectacularly. Piastri hasn’t so much taken a step in 2025 as a leap, to the point where he has been transformed from a second-year driver into a complete one delivering as if he were in his fourth or fifth season. That’s piled the pressure on Norris, whose performances have been erratic. The big difference between the two is mistakes, few and isolated for Piastri, but frequent and compounding for Norris.

Only in Australia, where both McLarens skated off the road when the rain hit – but only Piastri spun in attempting to rejoin –have things gone badly wrong for the Australian. That was a coin-toss as both made similar, entirely understandable errors, with Norris winning and Piastri only ninth. That could have set the tone for the season, but Piastri locked onto the positives of his race after a weekend where he qualified only 0.084sec slower and pushed his team-mate in the race. McLaren at one point even called off his threatening charge and ordered him to hold position because of the peril of the approaching pitstops.

He then won in China with a dominant performance at a track where he’d been all at sea in 2024. When he made another error, leaving the way clear for Verstappen to make a decisive, but unexpected, pass for the lead into the Tamburello chicane at Imola, he accepted it – finishing third – and then, after struggling on the streets of Monaco where Norris won, hit back with victory in Spain, another track where he toiled unsuccessfully the previous year.

That’s Piastri – ice-cool and ever-improving, seemingly unfazed by both victory and defeat. While he admits that “sometimes I need a rev-up”, this has defined his season so far. There have been events where he’s been blisteringly fast, for example on his way to winning in China and Bahrain, but there have been others where he hasn’t been and it’s arguably these that have made him so formidable. Take Saudi Arabia or Miami, where he was the slower McLaren driver yet still won. This isn’t damning with faint praise, because if you are going to rack up the numbers needed to be a world champion you can’t only win on your best weekends. In Miami, he relied on Norris’s misjudgement in trying to surge around the outside of Max Verstappen to win. Then he showed impeccable composure in timing his attack on the Red Bull driver. Likewise, in Jeddah, he kept his head in battle with Verstappen into Turn 1 and capitalised on the penalty for his opponent cutting the corner.

Norris should have had a decisive pace advantage in Saudi Arabia, but instead shot himself in the foot. Piastri carried more speed into the Turn 5 left-hander that forms the first part of an ess and Norris, despite being quicker through the whole sequence overall, couldn’t resist trying to match that. On his first Q1 lap, he carried in 7mph more and crashed. A perfectionist, historically he has tripped himself up by over-reaching. As McLaren team principal Andrea Stella explains, “he works better when he is at 99% of his potential; when he tries to extract 100% things trip over”. Piastri, by contrast, judges when to stick or twist impeccably in those pressure points. Canada is another example, where Norris had a pace advantage but blew both Q3 laps then got sucked into pointing his car into a closing gap and crashing while trying to overtake.

Crucial to Piastri’s edge is his better feel for the McLaren-Mercedes MCL39. It’s not a car that gives a huge amount of feedback, with Stella admitting the front axle is “relatively numb” and “is a car that doesn’t give you much cueing”. This is a consequence of the need to run these ground effect machines close to the ground to maximise performance, requiring precise mechanical platform control. It demands significant amounts of what’s called anti-dive on the front suspension.

“Piastri judges to stick or twist impeccably in pressure points”

Norris and Piastri have very different styles. Norris employs significant overlap between the braking and early cornering phases that can allow him to carry huge speed into the corner. It’s a technique that serves him well, but he struggles to feel the limit through the brakes and steering thanks to the characteristics of the McLaren. Generally an adaptable driver, this has made life difficult for him in 2025. Piastri, by contrast, has a simpler style (again, not a criticism) with a clearer delineation between the braking phase and turn-in but with phenomenal judgement of the available grip level. While Norris seems uncertain of exactly where the limit is and often steps over it, Piastri judges it brilliantly. He also accepts there will be corners where Norris is faster and focuses on optimising his own pace rather than grabbing at something that isn’t there.

“These cars are too fast to think, you either get what you anticipate from the car or you’re going to be slow and Lando doesn’t accept to be slow,” is Stella’s summary. He has long argued it’s McLaren’s job to find a way to give Norris a car that gives him the feedback he needs. This has led to minor differences on suspension configuration for the two through the season, with a geometry change introduced for the 10th race of the season in Canada that only Norris used. It appears to have given him slightly more feel, but the jury is still out about whether this can transform his season. It’s a configuration also available to Piastri, but he didn’t use it in Montreal because “it’s not an upgrade” and “I’ve been happy with how the car’s been so far”.

That’s not to say Piastri’s superiority is simply the consequence of the car not suiting Norris. The Australian exhibits better decision-making in wheel-to-wheel battle and has fewer lapses. Canada exemplified the differences between the two on a weekend where the McLaren, not at its best on the brakes and on traction, struggled by its 2025 standards. It was Norris who cracked and caused the collision.

This was the clash McLaren had long expected, albeit the most mild manifestation imaginable thanks to Norris instantly taking full responsibility for the incident. All season, Stella and McLaren Racing chairman Zak Brown talked of expecting such a clash – at times even seeming to welcome one. This struck some onlookers as a baffling approach, but it also made McLaren better equipped to deal with the fallout. In fact, Stella set out his stall on this matter a long time ago. Few will remember it, but in the 2023 Italian Grand Prix the pair made light contact battling for an inconsequential position by today’s standards at the chicane as Piastri emerged from the pits. Both drivers survived, but Stella didn’t brush it under the carpet and stressed that “there should never, ever, be contact between McLaren cars”.

Only Norris suffered from the consequences of the collision he caused in Montreal but Stella reiterated the need for caution after the race. It has yet to blow up between the pair, but the longer their private battle for the championship goes on the more likely there is to be a flashpoint. There have already been hints of drivers being willing to put their own objectives ahead of those of the team – Norris taking an extraordinarily long time to heed a team order in Hungary last year after being handed track position by a pitstop order dictated by the need to protect first and second positions, and Piastri by ambushing the sister car on the opening lap at Monza – but so far it’s not fully erupted. Both drivers play down the possibility, but the circumstances of the title fight might one day force one or the other to put their drivers’ championship hopes above the objectives of the team.

“Piastri is the more capable when it comes to putting his own interests above that of the team”

“It’s impossible to have your own personal goal directly in parallel with the team’s,” says Piastri. “That’s something we’ve both been very frank about, something that the team have been very aware of. We felt that if we went to this year with a car as strong as we finished with, we’d be in this situation. We’ve been very good at being open about it, talking about it, but we’re never going to do anything that’s unsportsmanlike or puts the team or ourselves in a bad light, that’s just not who Lando and I are. Of course, we want to beat each other every weekend but we’re never going to cross that line that’s going to cause damage that can’t be repaired. We don’t want just one opportunity at this, we’re both at McLaren for a very long time after this year and we want to fight for the championship every single year. We understand it’s pretty unwise to try and win one championship and bring the house down with it.”

Norris claims that the rising spectre of the Formula 1 world championship hasn’t changed anything in their battles or the way the season’s going.

“No,” says Norris when asked if he senses anything changing. “Of course, I’m speaking more from my side, and maybe Oscar says something different, but I don’t think he would. We turn up, we go out, we drive as well as we can. Maybe we want to beat each other, and that’s it. At the minute, there’s no need for things to be any trickier than they normally are. The data is open, all these things are open but there’s no reason for it to be any different than it normally is. It’s as simple as we both go on track, we both want to enjoy our lives here, we go on, we do the best we can.”

With McLaren determined to continue to give both drivers an equal chance, it’s impossible to escape the conclusion that Piastri is the more capable of the two drivers when it comes to putting his own interests above that of the team. Again, that’s not a criticism as this is something all world champions must be willing to do to a greater or lesser extent. The key is to know when to do it, while being a good team player the rest of the time. With manager Mark Webber, a driver who knows from bitter experience that it’s too easy to be forced into the number two role at a team, Piastri knows when he needs to be ruthless. Doubtless, when Norris crashed in Montreal he had a silent chuckle to himself in his helmet despite being wise enough not to voice that to the world. When the time comes, it’s unclear whether Norris could have the same detachment. Sometimes, you can’t be the ultimate team player if you want to win and that’s something most champions in F1 have to be willing to sacrifice when it matters. Some reduce this to Norris being ‘too nice’ and Piastri being capable of being ‘selfish’ but it’s not about casting one as the decent hero and the other the villain. In F1, it’s crucial to have that streak of self-interest if you are to be a serial winner. And so far, it’s Piastri who has shown himself capable of that as he strung together a hat-trick of wins in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Miami while Norris has yet to manage back-to-back victories in 2025.

“Norris is more comfortable in admitting to his frailties but he lacks certainty that he’s the best”

This battle matters not only because there’s a championship at stake, but because it’s a fight for McLaren’s future. Whoever loses will convince themselves they can turn the tables next year, assuming McLaren remains at the front through the major rule changes, but history tells us it rarely works like that. That’s because whoever prevails will see it as proof McLaren is now ‘their’ team. More importantly, most inside McLaren might see it the same way. Both drivers have long-term McLaren contracts but it would not be a surprise if the loser ends up either having to accept their lot as the support act, the David Coulthard to their team-mate’s Mika Häkkinen to invoke McLaren history, or move to another team to become its spearhead.

Piastri is winning this high-stakes game so far. However, he’s wise enough to realise that this could change if Norris can turn his pace into more consistent performances – witness his victory at at the Austrian GP where he withstood intense pressure from Piastri. Even so, the evidence so far, particularly when you combine it with Norris’s struggles to close the points gap to Verstappen last year, suggests the key difference between the pair is psychological. Piastri appears cold almost dispassionate. Norris, on the other hand, is more comfortable in admitting to his frailties and there are times where that self-knowledge can be a strength, but he lacks that ironclad certainty that he’s the best. Blunders linger for longer, and multiply as a result. While Stella says “there’s no noise in Oscar’s head”, you get the impression that for Norris it can, at times, be cacophonous.

Piastri’s fortitude will be tested as the season plays out and he knows a switch could flick for Norris and transform a driver seemingly racked with doubt to a new level of confidence. Neither has been through the wringer of a season-long world championship battle before and who knows what cracks will be exposed and widened. Should Verstappen become a more regular threat, George Russell a more consistent winner for Mercedes or Ferrari’s form turn around and allow Charles Leclerc and even Lewis Hamilton to be a factor at the front, that will also complicate matters and push both into uncharted territory in terms of the mental challenge ahead.

That’s what makes grand prix racing so compelling. It’s a 24-round duel in which both will land punches and the difference is as much about who can get up faster after taking a beating as it is who can dish it out. Piastri is ahead on points so far, but the knockout blow is to come and could still be delivered by either fighter.