Is 2025 F1's most boring title battle ever?

There’s been no pushing each other off the track from the McLaren boys. There’s been no parking in the pitbox a la Alonso in Hungary 2007 and no mind games such as excessively backing each other up under the safety car or refusing to give a tow in qualifying etc.

Away from the red hot heat of the circuit, it’s been all calm in 2025 too.

In the battles mentioned at the start of this piece, all drivers tried to play psychologically warfare – or just had random outbursts of emotion – which immediately upped the ante and entered F1 folklore.

“Ayrton has a small problem – he thinks he can’t kill himself,” announced Prost at the height of their rivalry. “That’s very dangerous.”

The lack of love lost between Williams’s mid-‘80s heroes was similar, but it was largely its Brazilian charge who did the talking in public.

“Mansell is argumentative, he’s rude and he’s got a really ugly wife,” was Piquet’s particularly non-PC comment on Mansell.

“He’s arrogant, and after he started winning races he started treating everyone really badly. Besides which, he’s written off piles of cars. No one wanted him to win.”

This is in some contrast to how Piastri recently commented on his 2025 battle with Norris when asked.

“Going into the year, we knew that it’s impossible to have your own personal goal directly in parallel with the team’s,” Piastri said.

“What if this is Piastri and Norris’s only chance?”

“And that’s something we’ve both been very frank about, something that the team has been very aware of.

“Of course, we want to go out and 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. Because, I’ve said it a few times now, 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. I think we both understand it’s pretty unwise to try and win one championship and bring the house down with it.”

Wow, how diplomatic. Norris is similarly even-sided when he discusses the Piastri battle.

“I’m employed by the team, and I have to drive and race for them,” he said. “As a number one, it is a constructor. That’s what we have to win in the end of the season. But then there’s the individual championship.

“Everyone’s seen plenty of championships as team-mates turn sour and go in the wrong direction. And that normally leads to many things, like a domino effect of things starting to fail. And that’s what we don’t want.”

But what if McLaren gets it wrong in 2026? What if this is Piastri and Norris’s only chance?

That was exactly the reason Hamilton and Alonso apparently tried to “bring the house down” during their incendiary 2007 season, and the same goes for Senna and Prost.

It might just be the last chance to achieve your life’s goal, and if ruining the atmosphere and camaraderie in the team is what it takes, then so be it – winning mattered / still matters more to those drivers.

The situation might be a dream for the McLaren communications staff, and mean that both drivers and Woking bosses have to answer very few difficult questions from the press, but it also means the rest of us are nodding off.

Things might build up as the second half of the season gets underway, as the realisation hits the Papaya drivers that this might be their only chance to be world champion, and they both start to race accordingly – with more on-track clashes ensuing.

Without that needle though, without that bite, it’s going to be a very quiet end to the season. One driver will finish slightly ahead of the other, and that’ll be it. 2025 world championship over. Passing without note.

As things stand, the current F1 title fight is all just a bit boring.