Lando Norris' Oscar Piastri problem ahead of Miami Grand Prix

News.com.au

29-04-2025

Lando Norris has an Oscar Piastri problem.
Rather than shadowing his championship challenge, as many has predicted after last season, Piastri is overshadowing Norris's title hopes.
The Australian has just taken the championship lead from his teammate with a 10-point advantage. He's on a two-race victory streak and has three wins from five races as the only multiple winner of the season to date.
Fortunately for the Briton, the Miami Grand Prix is next.
The Floridian street-style circuit is the scene of Norris's long-awaited first Formula 1 victory and the beginning of the epic comeback that ended McLaren's long run in the competitive wilderness with an elusive constructors championship.
Having needed a weekend off to reset after his bruising fortnight in the Middle East, returning to the happy memories of Miami should be the perfect salve.
But Piastri's shadow lingers here too.
Had it not been for circumstance, this so easily could have — should have? — been Piastri's first victory.
In 2025 he's out to make some happy memories of his own.
PIASTRI'S LOST FIRST WIN
McLaren's season had started slowly, the team having telegraphed early that the MCL38 would be undercooked on debut but would be revitalised by an in-season upgrade.
The first parts of that update arrived in Miami, round 5 of the championship.
By then McLaren had a strong development reputation, but like many teams determined to rush performance to the car, upgrades didn't always arrive in sufficient quantity to be applied to both drivers.
That was the case in Miami last year, where Norris received the full upgrade package but Piastri, lower in the drivers championship at the time, had to make do with only a partial update.
The team calculated the difference between the two specifications was around 0.2 seconds.
In other words, all things being equal, Piastri should have been around 0.2 seconds slower than Norris every lap.
In sprint qualifying Piastri beat Norris by 0.311 seconds — a net advantage of 0.511 seconds.
In qualifying for the grand prix Norris beat Piastri by just 0.081 seconds, putting Piastri a net 0.119 seconds ahead.
'We knew already how fast he is on a single lap,' McLaren boss Andrea Stella said, per Autosport, at the end of the weekend. 'Considering that he didn't have the full package, let me pay proper credit to Oscar. The gap he had to Lando in qualifying is smaller than the difference of the package he had.
'He was really pulling off strong performance over a single lap in very difficult conditions.'
Norris and Piastri launched from fourth and fifth on the grid, but by the end of the first lap the Australian had moved ahead, taking third, while Norris had slipped back to sixth.
And Piastri didn't stop there.
Clearly the quicker McLaren, he dispatched Charles Leclerc easily enough to bring pole-getter Verstappen into his sights.
He remained a stubborn 3.5 seconds adrift of the Red Bull Racing car. In response the Dutchman pitted for the hard tyre on lap 23. Piastri inherited the lead of the grand prix.
Immediately it was clear Verstappen's RB20 didn't like the new compound. McLaren kept Piastri out for four more laps to build a small tyre offset, pitting him at the end of lap 27.
Norris, meanwhile, had been toiling in sixth for much of the first stint. He gained places as drivers ahead of him pitted until suddenly he was in first place without having had to make an overtake.
That was the start of lap 28. Later that lap Kevin Magnussen and Logan Sargeant sent each other crashing into the barriers at turn 3, forcing a safety car.
By the end of the lap Norris was in the pits. With the safety car holding up the field, he rejoined the race with a lead he would never relinquish.
It was a strike of luck for the Briton, who had held the record for most podiums without a victory.
But it was bad luck for Piastri. Had he waited just one more lap before pitting, it would've been him, not Norris, who had benefited from the safety car to win the race.
He was later punted out of the points by Carlos Sainz, adding insult to injury, but it did nothing to mask the upside of Piastri's performance.
'Lando said something really nice before,' Stella said. 'He said by looking at Oscar overtaking a Ferrari, he felt, 'Wow, we are actually there today', so it was a realisation for Lando himself.
'He comes away from this weekend with this sort of conviction, especially in terms of race pace, which is something we wanted to improve having looked at Japan, having looked at China.
'I think Oscar comes out of this weekend even more conscious of his strengths as a driver.
'For me, he's in a very strong place.'
ANATOMY OF AN F1 COMEBACK
Miami signified more than Norris's breakthrough victory. It was also a landmark race for McLaren on its journey back to the top of Formula 1.
Woking's 2024 season started a little underwhelmingly. Its development trajectory in 2023 had been immense, dragging the car from the back of the grid to being best of the rest behind the all-conquering Red Bull Racing machine in just a few months, with the high point being Piastri's victory in the Qatar sprint late in the season.
Anticipation for 2024 had therefore been high, but during the pre-season the team worked hard to play down expectations, revealing that the new challenger would debut needing a major upgrade.
So it proved. Though Norris scored a couple of podiums — in Australia and China — it was well off the pace set by Red Bull Racing and behind even Ferrari.
But McLaren kept the faith, and by round 5 in Miami it was back on track, with Piastri's pace and Norris's victory signifying the start of a change in the Formula 1 balance of power.
Qualifying tells the story.
Average 2024 qualifying gap to pole, dry conditions
Miami onwards: McLaren 0.028 seconds ahead of Red Bull Racing
That's an effective 0.478-second turnaround in relative performance between the two frontrunning teams.
It's a reversal in fortunes evident on the title table.
Despite Norris's win, McLaren's points deficit to Red Bull Racing peaked after the Miami Grand Prix. That's because Sergio Pérez was still in reasonable form, scoring in both the sprint and the feature race along with Verstappen. McLaren, on the other hand, had only car in each race — Norris retired from Saturday with crash damage, while Piastri was punted out of the points by Sainz on Sunday.
But from Miami onwards McLaren made gradual and then rapid inroads into Red Bull Racing's points lead.
Championship position
Before Miami: Red Bull Racing ahead 195-96
Miami onwards: McLaren ahead 570-394
Down 115 points after Miami, McLaren effected a 192-point turnaround to beat Red Bull Racing by 77 points — though it secured the constructors championship by just 14 points from Ferrari in a final-race showdown.
In both cases — car speed and score rate — McLaren's trajectory has continued practically unabated into 2025.
McLaren leads the constructors championship by a commanding 77 points, and Piastri and Norris are first and second on the drivers title table.
Success in Formula 1 is never the result of a single moment or single development, but the multitude of factors that would hoist McLaren from the doldrums to the championship began culminating almost exactly a year ago at the 2024 Miami Grand Prix, and that work continues bearing fruit today.
PIASTRI IS ENTERING THE STRONGEST PART OF HIS SEASON
There's one other important lesson from year-old history worth considering ahead of the 2025 Miami Grand Prix.
Had Piastri won last year's race, it would have been at least as deserved a result as Norris's maiden victory.
That's not just because the Australian was McLaren's form driver that weekend. It's because he was to be the team's form man for the entire month of May and in fact for many months to come.
He was faster in qualifying for the following Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix, qualifying a career-best second, but he was penalised three grid places for a team communication error that had him impede Kevin Magnussen during Q1.
Norris proved on Sunday the car was quick enough to challenge pole-getter Verstappen for the entire race, finishing just 0.725 seconds off victory.
Piastri improved to finish fourth in a race that featured almost no overtaking, but what might have he managed had he started from the front row?
He then proved his potential at the Monaco Grand Prix, where he was pipped to pole by home favourite Charles Leclerc — though had he strung together his three best sectors, he would've started from the all-important P1 position by 0.07 seconds.
Overtaking is almost impossible in Monte Carlo, and the first-lap red flag killed the strategy element of the race too by allowing drivers to make their mandatory single tyre changes for free. Piastri finished second, exactly where he started.
That was really only the beginning for the Australian, who was the highest scorer in the sport through the 11-race European leg of the campaign.
Drivers championship, rounds 7 to 17, 2024
1. Oscar Piastri: 181 points
2. Max Verstappen: 177 points
3. Lando Norris: 171 points
4. Lewis Hamilton: 139 points
5. Charles Leclerc: 137 points
6. George Russell: 106 points
7. Carlos Sainz: 101 points
8. Sergio Pérez: 40 points
Now 12 months on, we're coming into what was the strongest part of Piastri's season last year.
Having already proved in the opening run of five races this year that he's massively improved his lows by winning at circuits that had delivered him little or no joy in previous seasons, there's anticipation Piastri could find yet more gears as the sport moves into the middle part of the campaign.
Every driver will have bad weekends in a 24-event season, but there's no reason to think Piastri has any major structural weaknesses left in his game.
It could be bad news for Norris as he arrives in Miami looking for an early reprieve and a chance to bounce back.
It might be a track of happy memories for him, but for Piastri this venue signifies unfinished business — and he's in the sort of form that doesn't leave loose ends.