Gen Z vs generational talent: how title battle between Lando Norris and Max Verstappen split F1 tribes

Mark Hughes – This year was Mark’s last full season of day-to-day Formula 1 race reporting after 30 years of following the F1 circus

The surface colours of the season constantly changed but the background of its canvas was always papaya as McLaren delivered a formidable weapon for its drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri; the unvarying competitive constant that was the MCL39. In the season’s first half Max Verstappen and Red Bull would occasionally appear, Jackson Pollock-like, to throw a splash of blue and yellow, making a mess of McLaren’s weekend, before retreating once more to plan some later ambush. There’d then be a few races where McLaren could relax into an apparently safe run to both titles. But those blue ambushes came more regularly after the summer break and their intensity and relentlessness prised apart the previously hidden weakness at McLaren.

When Verstappen and Red Bull applied the strain, the McLaren facade of serenity cracked and the radial fractures became visible as the team tried to fend off Verstappen while simultaneously equalising the opportunities of its own two drivers in chasing down their first world titles. It was a hell of a task to take on and we saw many times the confusion and discord it created.

What complicated that task immensely was the close and unusual dynamic between McLaren and Norris. This is something that has been widely misunderstood by the watching world, unsurprisingly so because it absolutely does not conform to any Formula 1 precedent and flies against traditional sporting mentality.

“Norris has a turn of speed which even Max acknowledges is special”

Norris has been very open throughout his F1 career about his struggles with mental health. He’s been a poster boy for awareness campaigns on the subject as he’s fought his demons – ever-more successfully with each season – around depression, anxiety and doubt. Fundamental to his way of coping with these issues is an openness of his weaknesses, a trait so alien to this sport. F1 is a harsh environment to be carrying that and yet he’s doing it – and he’s succeeding. Not with quite as much success as would come his way if he didn’t have those issues, but then he wouldn’t be who he is. That would be some different man who isn’t him.

He has immense talent – when it all slots into place for him he has a turn of speed which even Verstappen acknowledges is pretty special. But he doesn’t always have full access to it and can’t always combine it with hard-headed choices in wheel-to-wheel combat. His performances can still be a little brittle on the outer edges of competition where the mental pressures are vast, forceful and insistent and the specific skill requirements so complex and ever-changing. Norris asking for – and getting – help angers some. As does him talking about his limitations. Others – particularly from within his own Gen Z age group – love him for it. The polarisation of the world in the social-media age has swept through F1 as a new generation of fans have clashed with the traditional, older core. The values around what has always been the natural competitive dynamic of hard-headed, ruthless striving – embodied in Red Bull and Verstappen – has clashed with some newer racing fans. But those fans clash with each other too and you feel the whole sport is becoming increasingly tribal. There’s been a further step-change in that this season.

On the one hand much of the younger generation values divergence and tolerance, but there are other parts of the same generation dismissive of that as ‘woke’ – and the readiness to be outraged and offended at opposing views just powers the tribalism further.

What has all this got to do with the shape of the F1 season? Well, quite a lot. Those in charge at McLaren –the emotionally intelligent Andrea Stella and the pragmatic Zak Brown – understand Norris’s challenges and try their best to accommodate them. So when Stella talks of possible unconscious bias in some of the decision-making on the pitwall – notably in Qatar – he was referring not to some preference for Norris over Piastri but to the fact that Norris has required more maintenance than the more robust Piastri.

Norris has more often got himself into a situation requiring help: his lock-up in Q2 at Monza, for example, where Piastri was asked to give him a tow to ensure his graduation to Q3. Piastri has required no help, which is to his credit but it illustrates the tricky waters a team can get into if it attempts to make everything theoretically equal. The team bodged Norris’s pitstop the following day and, feeling it unfair that he was compromised by a team failure, he was gifted the place he’d lost to Piastri back. That was on the cusp of unreasonable. Helping him escape the consequences of his own mistake the day before – and enlisting title rival Piastri to do it – was probably beyond that line.

That is at the core of how McLaren has operated around Norris’s vulnerabilities – something made more apparent by Piastri having stepped up his game in his third season, joining up the searing speed and ruthless racecraft more consistently. This applied the stress to more clearly expose the team’s way of accommodating Norris. It wasn’t that the team was deliberately favouring Norris; more accurately it’s the team needing to help him more because he simply isn’t as self-reliant as Piastri, a much more traditionally tough racing driver. So Norris’s more fragile/brittle performances have put him in situations requiring help more frequently, which has ended up being not entirely fair on Piastri.

So some see McLaren as a woke entity, which is being shown by the advancing hard-charging ruthless Verstappen/Red Bull machine that acknowledging and accommodating weaknesses has no place in F1. Well, McLaren has shown that it can. If Max is a generational talent, McLaren is a Generation Z team that has emerged from the vulnerable Norris/emotionally intelligent Stella axis.

That new culture among the sport’s followers has been building for a while. But in 2025 it became part of a title fight for the first time, an interesting twist unconnected to the increasing Hollywood-isation of the sport which has made some very rich men even richer. The huge success of the Brad Pitt F1 movie boosted F1’s valuation yet-further. To the extent that the Mercedes team is now valued at £4.6bn, a sum that would have bought you the whole sport twice over just a decade ago.

“The highest profile star F1 has ever seen was nothing more than support cast this year”

Increasingly, it feels like there are two parallel versions of F1: the showbiz one preoccupied with the superficialities and ‘influencers’ – and the real one. Much of the more recent following is invested in the former and uninterested in the latter. The entertainment and the sport; that’s always been a dichotomy but the distinction today is clearer than ever. A tweet about Carlos Sainz’s preferred brand of shades would almost certainly generate more hits than one explaining his adaptation to less engine braking on the Williams compared to the Ferrari.

As the passing of the years changes the sport’s complexion, the natural law of the jungle still applies. It can be cruel. Lewis Hamilton, once the pride of the pack, had his status challenged back in 2021 by Verstappen, and he was on the very cusp of seeing off the usurper when the outcome of that epic season was invalidated by that infamous call completely outside of the sporting regulations. It’s arguable whether Hamilton has ever been quite the same since and if he thought he could be reinvigorated by his late career switch to Ferrari at 40 he was set to be very disappointed. What he found at Maranello was a team lacking in several key areas of organisational structure – and a team-mate in Charles Leclerc faster than any he has ever encountered. A mediocre car with a super-fast team-mate was the nightmare scenario for someone with a bigger bank of success than any driver has ever had.

The car required a lot of adapting to, particularly its reliance on engine braking to help with rotation into a corner, something Leclerc has incorporated brilliantly into his driving over the years. Hamilton’s late-brake muscle memory, already unsuited to this generation of car, liked this one even less. Watching him under the spotlight come to terms with the shortfall in his own performances was often uncomfortable to witness. It felt like you were intruding on a personal torment at times. The highest-profile star the sport has ever seen was nothing more than support cast on track this year. New stars formed and one of them, Kimi Antonelli, replaced him at Mercedes and another, the searingly fast Ollie Bearman, looks set to take his place sooner or later at Ferrari. A third, Isack Hadjar, was so unerringly quick in the Racing Bulls that he’d be announced as Verstappen’s 2026 team-mate. Gabriel Bortoleto – protege of the still impressive Fernando Alonso – was the fourth starring rookie. All of which just made the spotlight on Hamilton’s struggles even more intense.

At the time of writing he was hanging his hopes on the new generation of ’26 car proving less stubbornly resistant to how he likes to drive. But it was difficult not to think that the Hamilton of a few years ago would have much more comfortably learned new tricks. China sprint victory aside, 2025 was a desolate season, only further emphasising the changing backdrop through which the sport charges with barely a backward glance. That time was being measured in F1 by more than just lap times was never more apparent than in this season.