How long can Piastri keep up the fireworks show?

Usually, when a racing driver claims that “I’m not that bothered by the fact that I’m leading the championship”, they are trying to convince themselves not to get carried away; take each race as it comes, focus on the process, the rest will follow. Yet when Oscar Piastri said this after making it three wins out of five with victory in Saudi Arabia, you believed him. The 24-year-old is F1’s new iceman, apparently unflappable whether facing triumph, disaster or anything in between, even when he could justifiably be delighted with how the first six weeks of the season unfolded. It’s almost as if Piastri has skipped a year, or returned to school after summer break transformed by a growth spurt. Pre-season, the questions surrounding him were all about whether he could make another step forward and match or even beat McLaren teammate and title favorite Lando Norris consistently, something achieved only sporadically across his first two F1 campaigns. The high standard of his best work was clear for all to see, the only question was whether he could join the dots of his performance peaks to become relentlessly strong. He’s answered that emphatically, and now seems the finished article. It’s too small a sample set – five race weekends across six weeks – to draw definitive conclusions, but Piastri’s trend is encouraging to say the least. He has a 10-point lead and has been the quietly serene center of McLaren’s season while teammate Norris has sometimes flailed in troubled waters. Each of the five races so far has proved something about Piastri. In Australia, where a home driver has never claimed a top-three finish in the world championship era (Daniel Ricciardo’s runner-up spot in 2014, which he was later stripped of for a fuel-flow breach, is the closest), Piastri pressured Norris all the way. Until, that is, both McLaren drivers flew off the track at Turn 14 when the rain returned on lap 44; Piastri spinning when rejoining and turning second place with a shot at victory into ninth. Reflecting on the weekend, he felt he’d made a point. “It hurt after the race, but there were a lot of positives from the whole weekend,” said Piastri. “Through all of practice and qualifying, I built my weekend really well, I performed well in qualifying as well. While the result didn’t look too different from last year, my own personal feeling was a lot stronger. The race was very strong apart from one corner where, looking back on it, apart from maybe taking up some rally driving lessons through gravel, I’m not sure I could have done anything too differently, being the second car through that corner. From a racecraft point of view, I was pretty happy with some of my overtakes.” A spin in duck-friendly conditions in Australia turned a likely home-race podium into a disappointed ninth, but Piastri still took plenty of positives from the weekend. Andy Hone/Getty Images Piastri’s China weekend, where he followed up overtaking Max Verstappen to finish second in the sprint with victory in the grand prix, was significant not only because he beat Norris, but because it was one of the tracks where he struggled most in 2024 on his first visit to the Shanghai circuit. Stella cited this as confirmation of Piastri’s big step. “He’s improved over the winter,” said Stella after Piastri’s victory there. “There’s been a lot of work, a long list of opportunities, a long list of races that you review – here we should do this, these adaptations. The biggest indication of his progress is, 12 months ago in China, I remember after the race having a chat, one-to-one outside hospitality, and scratching our heads and saying ‘there’s a lot to pick from learnings from this race’. Twelve months after, we took these learnings and capitalized.” Although there were mitigating factors for his ’24 performance, notably the car jumping into neutral in his sprint qualifying lap and damage sustained when Daniel Ricciardo’s car was pushed into the rear of his McLaren by Lance Stroll, he struggled all weekend with what he called a “peaky” track surface in terms of grip. While the resurfacing that made the track quicker in ’25 means it’s not a direct comparison, that wasn’t his only struggle last year. He will also have a second chance to confirm his progress at a track where he had trouble before when F1 goes to Barcelona in June. At Suzuka, he finished third behind Norris, with both McLarens bottled up behind Verstappen. While a disappointing result, he felt he was faster than Norris (a difficult claim to substantiate given both were limited by Verstappen being in the way) and Suzuka was a track where his tire management had been a problem in the past. That’s an area of his game that, as with all rookies, has evolved dramatically to the point where he now appears to be at a similar level to Norris everywhere. While Piastri underachieved in Japan, with a mistake at Turn 2 in Q3 costing him pole position and a likely win, his gains in speed over both a single lap and race stint were evident. Then came Bahrain, which was a weekend of crushing dominance while Norris was flummoxed by the demands of the McLaren and struggled to third place. By contrast, Piastri’s win seven days later in Saudi Arabia was on a weekend where he was the second-fastest McLaren driver, but avoided his teammate’s blunder of crashing in Q3. Although he missed out on pole position, he jumped Verstappen at the start, kept his head through the first corner and closed out victory in what he called “a difficult race”. You could argue he was fortunate, but to be a driver who racks up regular wins and title victories, you need to be good enough to win on weekends where you aren’t at your best. That set of five races has revealed much about Piastri, with his consistency proving that he’s delivered on many of his targets of the season. Talking at McLaren’s Silverstone launch in February, he summarized his objective as “building up the resilience to be able to adapt a bit quicker in the weekends”. The fact he’s not gone missing in any of the five events so far, something that did happen at times last year when he was well off Norris’s level, confirms he’s made that step in qualifying – where Norris destroyed him in 2024 – in particular. “Oscar is just more confident in qualifying,” said Stella in Jeddah. “He’s more capable of putting things together. He has more awareness, which comes with experience, which comes with all the analysis that has been going on during the winter. So we see a stronger Oscar, like we see a very strong Lando. McLaren’s Andrea Stella points to qualifying as one of the areas Piastri has made gains since last year – a point the Australian has underscored with two poles from the first five races, the most recent coming in Bahrain (above). Andy Hone/Getty Images “What I see, and I still look at quite a lot of telemetry myself, is two drivers that push each other and pick from each other. They’re almost complementary as to where they go fast and slow, so they can see a lot of opportunities. Then I see the synergy, and the synergy means an elevation of the game.” There are hints that Piastri might be better equipped to benefit from this than Norris. While Norris is a driver who has experimented endlessly with his driving technique and built a formidable toolkit, one that enables him to be fast in most situations and execute brilliantly-managed race stints, he has long struggled with reaching for perfection in qualifying. The presence of a driver like Piastri who can and will be quicker in certain corners is potentially something that encourages him to overreach, while perhaps the Australian is better able to accept where he is slower and focus on making the best of what he can do. For example, Norris underachieved in sprint qualifying in China after trying to attack the hairpin more – a corner where Piastri was simply faster. Likewise, was his Q3 crash in Saudi Arabia caused by an attempt to match the speed Piastri carried into the Turn 4-5 left-right? He was 12km/h faster than on previous attempts, understeered, and was pitched into the barrier when the front end bit and transitioned to oversteer. This highlights two aspects where Piastri is seemingly stronger than Norris. One is well-proven – namely, his ability to carry speed into slow corners requiring combination braking/turning where Norris sometimes struggles with the feel. The simple reason for this is Piastri tends towards the classic ‘v-style’ approach in slower corners, with lower minimum speed but attacking the entry more, whereas Norris is more the ‘u-style’ keeping up minimum speed but elongating the corner. Both are adaptable, but that’s one area where Norris has persistently struggled. The other area is Piastri’s mentality. So laid back he borders on horizontal, he appears completely unconcerned by anything that’s happening. That means he’s cool under pressure, not easily distracted and has a calm ruthlessness that potentially gives him the edge in pressure points. There are two examples of the value of this from races in 2024 that highlight these strengths. One was his race-winning move on Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari into the first corner at Baku at a time when he was being advised by race engineer Tom Stallard to introduce the hard Pirellis he’d recently bolted on carefully. It was sound engineering advice, but Piastri overruled it with his racing head as he realized this was his chance to gain track position. Once he had it, he defended stoutly. Piastri has remained resolutely unflappable throughout his F1 career up to this point, although how he might respond to the intensity of a late-season championship fight remains to be seen. Peter Fox/Getty Images The second example was Monza last year. Then, Norris still had hopes of closing the points gap to Verstappen and Piastri was the support act. McLaren instigated the infamous ‘papaya rules’ of engagement, but Norris was surprised when Piastri lunged him into the second chicane on the opening lap to take the lead. That compromised Norris’s run through the corner and allowed Leclerc to slip past. While arguably an overly aggressive move on his teammate, the team later confirmed it wasn’t against the rules – although it became so once they were refined. This is what makes Piastri so dangerous – his ruthlessness. He appears to have the psychological profile broadly in line with many of the world champions; confident, decisive, assertive. To use a phrase popularized by legendary German football manager Jurgen Klopp while at Liverpool, Piastri is a “mentality monster” while Norris appears to be more brittle. This could be the key difference between the two that, in a championship fight, will hand the initiative to Piastri. Then again, you could also point to Norris’s very public pondering of disregarding team orders in Hungary last year when McLaren’s cautious strategy gave him an unearned track position advantage over Piastri, as revealing he’s not above doing what so many champions have done and putting his own objectives ahead of the team’s interests. He denies that he ever seriously considered this, but that showed those who argue he doesn’t have the psychology of a champion are oversimplifying None of this proves Piastri has got Norris’s number – at least, not yet. His points lead is only 10, Piastri’s worst result – that ninth in Australia – is considerably worse than Norris’s low-water mark of fourth in Saudi Arabia – and he’s yet to prove that what we’ve seen across the first five races is repeatable across a full season of 24 races. That’s a key question given his campaign last year trailed off badly, but if you extrapolate from what we’ve seen so far he will tick that box. Also, while from the outside he appears rock-solid mentally, the intensity of a title fight will test him like never before. Everyone has their breaking point and while Norris very publicly admits to being fragile at times, he has also proved himself eminently capable of bouncing back quickly. Nobody can really be sure what’s going on in someone’s head. Piastri seems impossible to derail, but we can’t be sure there isn’t a set of circumstances that could knock him off course. So far, the evidence suggests not, but 2025 needs to play out to confirm that. And even those inside the team privately recognized that if the trend of the season so far continues then it’s very likely the pair are going to have flashpoints, perhaps even a collision, on track that risks escalating their friendly, collaborative, rivalry into something more destructive. We can’t be sure how Piastri or Norris might react in that situation. For now, all we can conclude is that Piastri has taken a huge step forward, bigger, perhaps, than even his team expected. And that could very well take him to the world championship in 2025.