Australian Grand Prix, Oscar Piastri battling for his first drivers champion, McLaren’s first drivers title since 2008, Lando Norris to start at title favourite, constructors championship, team orders, papaya rules
Oscar Piastri is about to embark on just his third Formula 1 campaign, but his target in 2025 is clear.
“I want to win the world championship this year,” he said, per Autosport. “I do think that I can become world champion this year.”
It’s a quote as understated as the 23-year-old Melburnian himself.
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Every driver thinks they have the ability to win the world championship. You don’t become one of the 20 chosen ones without that unshakeable self-belief.
But this isn’t just an unremarkable expression of belief. It’s an expression of confidence that he deserves to be considered as one of the season’s protagonists.
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The 2025 Formula 1 season starts this weekend at Albert Park, where Oscar Piastri will be the best-placed Aussie in years to break our home-race podium curse. Can he get it done? Michael and Matt also check in on blockbuster opening rounds of the Supercars and MotoGP seasons.
Piastri is used to the competitive limelight. He won three junior titles on the bounce, all in succession, to make himself one of the most hyped rookies in years on debut in 2023.
But it’s taken him three years to get what the paddock assumes will be a title-contending car, McLaren having unexpectedly surged to the constructors championship last season.
Now Piastri’s self-confidence will be put to the test — but not against McLaren’s opposition.
His first challenge will be to overcome teammate Lando Norris in the fight to become McLaren’s first drivers champion since Lewis Hamilton in 2008.
PAPAYA RULES?
McLaren’s fast-track to title contention last year threw up some uncomfortable questions for team management as it grappled with its new-found leader status in the sport.
None was pricklier than handling the competitive aspirations of Norris and Piastri.
Norris is the team’s established homegrown star. McLaren has been explicitly built around him for years, and at long last the Briton is finally enjoying the fruits of his and the team’s labour, scoring his maiden victory at last year’s Miami Grand Prix.
Piastri, on the other hand, showed up out of the blue and immediately began applying pressure to Norris in his rookie season. By last year he was pinching victories that on paper should’ve gone Norris’s way.
At first the team struggled to rein in its drivers. Norris famously argued with his race engineer, Will Joseph, for lap after lap over the need to give the lead of the Hungarian Grand Prix back to Piastri after a team strategy had incidentally put the Briton into first place.
Eventually Norris relented, and though the team did its best to present an unflustered image after the race, team principal Andrea Stella didn’t mince his words when asked about the significance of driver disobedience.
“We have discussions with our race drivers before every race,” Stella said. “We talk about our principles, going racing.
“One principle, just to make an example — I don’t want to disclose too much, but this one is simple — is: the interest of the team comes first.
“If you mess up on this matter, you cannot be part of the McLaren Formula 1 team. That’s the principle.”
The team took an increasingly interventionist approach to its driver management that culminated in the deployment of the ‘papaya rules’ call at the Italian Grand Prix, where Piastri and Norris were locked in what they had thought was an exclusive battle for victory before Charles Leclerc outstrategised both to win for Ferrari.
Thereafter team orders became explicit. Norris was the first to be asked to help Piastri — by holding up Sergio Pérez in Azerbaijan to prevent him from jumping the McLaren — while Piastri was later more often used to boost Norris’s points haul, notably by giving up victory in the Sao Paulo sprint and positions in the grand prix later that weekend.
The team made it to the end of the season without another flashpoint but not without creating a certain impression: that Norris was its lead driver and Piastri his second in command.
Norris, after all, finished second in the drivers championship and briefly had a shot at challenging for the drivers crown. Piastri finished fourth and 82 points behind his teammate.
Consequently the Briton is talked about as the favourite to beat Max Verstappen to the title this year, with Piastri given lesser billing.
But Piastri doesn’t see it that way.
“It’s definitely a clean slate,” he said, per EPSN. “Everyone is starting on zero again.”
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PIASTRI’S LAST REMAINING WEAKNESS
Last year’s final points tally tells only part of the story.
Around half those points came in the first six rounds, before Piastri got the team’s season-changing upgrade package. Most of the rest of them came in the final flyaway rounds as Norris’s outside chance at the drivers championship began dominating the F1 narrative.
Through the middle of the season Piastri wasn’t just in good form, he was in series-leading touch.
The Australian was the sport’s best scorer through the European leg of the season, beginning with the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix in May and ending with his victory at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in September.
Drivers championship, Emilia-Romagna to Azerbaijan
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
The middle of the season is usually when drivers build momentum that carries them through to the conclusion. So what happened to Piastri’s run?
“For me probably one of the big things through the middle of the season was that they’re all on tracks that I’ve raced at for a long time now,” Piastri told the Australian Grand Prix program. “I think at the end of the year, yes, it was more competitive, there were a few more cars up the front more regularly but also still on tracks that I didn’t have much experience at — I think I was still learning things.”
It’s also worth remembering that McLaren also came off the boil in the final rounds of the year, with Ferrari taking the constructors title down to the wire.
Piastri also admitted to errors creeping into his game late.
“There were some mistakes in there as well. Mexico, for example, was a missed opportunity with qualifying there. Brazil was still a good weekend in the dry, and then in the rain it was pretty chaotic.
“There were still a lot of good weekends towards the end but just not quite at the heights of the middle of the year.”
It would be unfair to say the sophomore was anything like error-prone, but there was one clear facet in which he was found erratically lacking to Norris.
After pushing his teammate so hard in qualifying 2023, he fell well off the pace last season.
Oscar Piastri’s qualifying statistics, 2024
Qualifying result: 5.42 average
Qualifying head to head: 4-20 behind Norris
Qualifying differential: 1.88 places behind Norris
Time differential: 0.223 seconds behind Norris
“I think a lot of that was just down to making life difficult for myself in qualifying,” he said.
Intriguingly the crucial 4-20 score line and 0.223-second average margin were both steps backwards relative to 2023.
“There were probably four or five races where the gap was bigger than I wanted in qualifying, which I wasn’t particularly thrilled about,” he said.
“The painful thing was there were a hell of a lot of races where the gap was somewhere between zero and half a tenth or a tenth of a second.
“I think the story of qualifying this year was just that last tenth — that was where I was lacking a little bit — and some consistency.”
It’s also true to say Norris stepped up his qualifying game in 2024, perhaps spurred both by Piastri’s challenge and by his own inconsistency during the previous year.
However, it’s also important to note that, on the flip side, Piastri’s grand prix performances improved markedly, not least for him collecting his first pair of victories.
Oscar Piastri’s race statistics, 2024
Race result: 5.13 average
Race head to head: 8-16 to Norris
Race differential: 0.83 places behind Norris
On average Piastri was finishing directly behind Norris last season. But rather than that being a function of his racecraft, it was actually by virtue of him often underqualifying the car based on its potential.
On a grid as tight as last year’s — and it’s likely to get only tighter this season — his qualifying deficit proved decisive in the late-season points swing against him.
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CAN HE DO IT?
So what’s it going to take to tighten up his Saturdays to improve his Sundays?
“If I can qualify a bit higher up and give myself a better chance at the start of races, then that’s hopefully going to make life a little bit easier next year,” he told the grand prix program.
“I’m not looking for a lot, I’m looking for a little bit. That’s not just going to come by trying to drive faster; there’s science that needs to go into that.
From what we know about Piastri after two seasons in Formula 1, the required level of improvement should be comfortably within his grasp.
Whether it’s from day to day during a single round, weekend to weekend during a season or from year to year, Piastri’s steep trajectory of improvement has been characteristic of his time in the sport.
“His rate of improvement hasn’t really dulled in 39 races,” his race engineer, Tom Stallard, told the F1 Nation podcast. “He keeps learning, he keeps improving, he keeps wanting information, going through stuff. We discuss things. He goes and executes it.
“So for me, if you’re improving at that rate, what’s the limit? The limit comes when that improvement flattens off, and at the moment we’ve seen no sign of that flattening off, so that’s obviously going well.”
Last year his target was improved race pace, particularly when it came to managing the sensitive Pirelli tyres. It was an understandable weakness cured only with seat time, and by the end of last season he’d made meaningful strides on this front that contributed to some commanding performances.
But consistency was still lacking, particularly relative to Norris, who almost always performed at a high level last year.
Eliminating his bad days is the critical next step towards challenging for the championship.
“I feel like 12 months ago I was going into the season still with some weaknesses that I wasn’t particularly confident with,” Piastri said of the 2024 campaign. “I think through last season I addressed them.
“It’s now just about addressing them every weekend and making sure that I’m putting my best foot forward every weekend and that is what is going to be the difference.”
Piastri preparing for F1 title fight | 00:54
HOW WILL McLAREN HANDLE A DRIVER DUEL?
If Piastri makes the gains expected of him and if McLaren’s car is as quick as some of its rivals believe it to be, the team will find itself with a dilemma on its hands.
Norris vs Piastri would be blockbuster racing, particularly given each brings a unique approach to the sport.
Piastri is as cold as ice, as we saw from some of his gutsy passes last year, including on the sister car. Norris, on the other hand, comes across as operating on a more active psychological level. Sometimes the killer instinct doesn’t appear as though it comes as easily for him, even if the way he goes about his craft clearly works for ultimate speed.
How will McLaren handle two young, hungry drivers both contending for the world championship? And what will happen if the title fight were to boil down to just the McLaren teammates?
“The team is in the lucky position of having two drivers that can contend for victories,” team boss Stella said, per ESPN. “The main aspect is that both drivers start the season with equal opportunities.”
You’ll struggle to find a team in the paddock that doesn’t give their drivers equal opportunity at the start of the season — even Red Bull Racing doesn’t have any formal agreement guaranteeing Max Verstappen number-one stats — but Stella is confident his drivers have understood the brief.
“Our fundamentals are based on the racing principles that we already used last year,” he said.
“We used them for very good conversations, we reviewed last season, and I was actually quite proud of last season. We reviewed all the situations in which there was a proximity between the two drivers, and I was quite impressed by how well they behaved.
“One point I’m quite proud to share is that when we reviewed last season the drivers and the team — most of the time represented by myself — we always looked at ourselves — ‘I could have done this better,’ rather than Lando saying ‘Oscar should have done this better,’ and Oscar saying ‘Lando should have done this better’.
“I think we take some learning from last year, but already I think that was positive in terms of how we interacted and acted together as a team, and then we will start from this concept of equal opportunities and our racing principles.”
And in case either Norris or Piastri thought the situation wasn’t serious, Stella made clear he was laying down the law before any potential on-track altercation.
“And the racing principles, it’s important to say, they are representative not only of what the team believes in terms of how we go racing, but also what the drivers believe as to how we go racing,” he said.
“If a driver is not fully into these principles, then that’s not the right driver for McLaren.”
It’s the ultimate threat: obey or quit.
Will that be enough to prevent tensions fraying?
Or is the Piastri-Norris partnership destined to be fractious with the title on the line?
