Coming into 2025, Oscar Piastri's route to meeting the lofty expectations placed upon him were heavily on the line.
Piastri came to McLaren and was matched with highly touted teammate Lando Norris, with the team since 2019.
In their first two F1 seasons together, the battle wasn't particularly close. In 2023, Norris was ahead 17-5 in races and 15-7 in qualifying. In 2024, when McLaren became the best car on pace over the course of the year, Norris dominated again -- 16-8 in races, 20-4 in quali.
Even though Norris had some flawed drives, Piastri just wasn't touching Norris. Until now.
Piastri's stats
Standings Position: 1st
Points: 284
Best Finish: 1st (6 times)
Best Qualifying Position: 1st (4 times)
Head-to-head race finishes (vs. Norris): 7-7
Head-to-head qualifying: 8-6
Head-to-head points: 284-275
A mostly flawless first half from Piastri
Oscar Piastri's 2025 season started with a race that could have indicated another season of him falling behind his teammate.
At his home race, Norris was within his grasp when a quick flash of rain sent both cars off-track in the final sector of the Melbourne circuit. Norris got away with minimal issues, but Piastri was basically beached in the grass and was just barely able to get out. Norris won and Piastri finished 9th.
But since ... Piastri has been incredible. He's only finished off the podium once since (4th in Montreal), and has only qualified worse than third once (Miami, 4th).
This isn't to say he's dominating Norris every week, but he is always in the hunt, and rarely is Norris completely taking over a weekend. Piastri does only have one win in his last five outings, but the gaps to Norris were...
- Austrian GP: -2.7 seconds
- British GP: -6.8 seconds (without the time penalty that was, yes, bad, but has nothing to do with pace, he likely would've won)
- Hungarian GP: -0.7 seconds
What stands out about Piastri's efforts are how mature and calm they tend to be. Piastri is operating in a way that feels totally different from where he was the last two seasons. He is producing results with few errors in a way that Norris is still chasing.
Piastri now needs to get back to his winnings ways like he did in China, Bahrain (16 seconds on Norris who was P3) and Saudi Arabia to make sure Norris doesn't, at best for Piastri, get within one point of the championship lead.
Can Piastri get the job done?
Piastri now enters a ten-race stretch with plenty of tracks where he doesn't have a ton of success in his first two seasons. He has five combined podiums in 20 tries at the schedule's remaining tracks -- although part of that is a stretch of tracks where McLaren underperformed as a team last season.
Piastri's best finish at Zandvoort is P4 (Norris won last year). He's struggled at COTA (P5, DNF) and anverages finishes of 8th in Mexico (3.5 for Norris), 12th in Brazil (4th for Norris) and 8th in Abu Dhabi (3rd for Norris, including a win in 2024).
On the other end, Piastri ate Norris' lunch on the first lap at Monza last year, won at Baku and has always performed incredibly well in Qatar. Also, we may have to thrown out the record books on Piastri's first two seasons after how he was done this year.
Norris has begun to show signs of life in the title fight, and if he cleans up the mistakes, can Piastri capture the championship on pure pace?