MPH: Emotional Norris is making bad calls in fight with cool-headed Piastri
F1
A third of the way through the 2025 F1 season, McLaren's title fight is shaping into a psychological duel as much as a physical one - with one key element giving Oscar Piastri the edge over Lando Norris, says Mark Hughes
Ten races down, 14 to go and Lando Norris lags 22 points behind team-mate Oscar Piastri at the top of the championship table. Piastri has won five times, Norris twice (with two for Max Verstappen and one for George Russell).
Off the back of Norris’ disastrous race-ending collision with the back of Piastri’s car in Canada, it may feel inevitable that Piastri is going to prevail. He’s driven with more assurance and consistency, made far fewer crucial errors and shown himself to be emotionally airtight, in stark contrast to Norris, who has clearly struggled at times.
But as Piastri himself points out, that 22-point gap is almost meaningless at this stage. “All it would take would be three races of me finishing second behind Lando and he’s made almost all those points back up.”
What is clear is that neither one of them is demonstrably faster than the other. It swings between them from venue to venue, sometimes even from day to day at the same venue. This isn’t a Senna-Prost ’88-89 in-team title contest dynamic in that sense. It’s more like Mansell-Piquet ’86 or Hamilton-Alonso ’07.
Although Norris has scored only two poles to Piastri’s four, there have been races where Piastri achieved it through Norris messing up rather than Piastri being intrinsically quicker on that day. Jeddah – where Norris crashed heavily in Q3 after being comfortably quickest every time he ran up to that point – was the most stark example of that. Aside from his straight victories in Melbourne and Monaco, Norris has looked potentially quicker on race day in China, Miami and Canada, but was behind through his own errors. In terms of one outpacing the other with no ambiguity, we can point only to three races of the 10: Piastri in Bahrain and Spain, Norris in Monaco.
Norris was the faster McLaren driver in Canada
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Even Bahrain contains a small detail which skews the picture: on their out-laps for the final Q3 attacks, they were running in formation, Piastri ahead, taking the early part of the prep lap very easily so as to not have the tyres overheat during the attack lap. At a certain point quite late in the prep lap they were both instructed to build the pace to ensure the front tyres were not too cool for the start of the lap. Norris did so, Piastri initially did not. As Norris found himself now too close to the other McLaren, so he had to back off to create a gap so as not to be in its dirty air. As Norris backed off, then Piastri built up the speed and the tyre temperatures to begin his lap. Norris arrived at Turn 1 with his front tyres under-temperature, got a lot of understeer which flicked into oversteer as the fronts finally bit – and that was Norris’ lap ruined.
It perhaps illustrated that cliched killer instinct of Piastri and a trusting naivety of Norris, one which might be telling.
When Norris's bold attempt to pass Piastri ended with a crash into the Montreal pitwall, it stirred memories of McLaren's infamous 2011 clash between Button and Hamilton at the very same circuit, says Mark Hughes
By
Mark Hughes
But perhaps the most important thing for Norris to do after he resets in the wake of what happened in Canada is to come back with a clearer head. There’s been an emotion in several of his incidents which has made for bad decisions. Several instinctive moves have been the wrong ones – putting himself at the mercy of Verstappen on the opening lap in Miami, for example, or indeed staying committed to the left of Piastri in Montreal – on days when he’s been potentially the quicker McLaren driver.
By contrast, Piastri, on days when Norris has had his number, has parked any emotion of that, able to just resolve to maximise himself, regardless of whether that is less than what Norris can do on the day. On the few occasions that’s happened, Piastri has sometimes prevailed anyway. Because Norris has inflicted his own penalty upon himself.
Piastri has so far displayed greater clarity of thinking. That is really the essential difference between them so far. If Norris can correct that, there are probably more gains to be had than trying to squeeze out yet more speed. The speed side may even be taking care of itself now that he has the front suspension tweak designed to give him the feeling he said he’d lost from last year’s car.
This is far from over for Norris, regardless of how it might look.
