Usually, when racing drivers claim that they are “not bothered by the fact that I am leading the championship,” they try to convince themselves not to get carried away. You will receive each race and focus on the process, with the rest continuing. But when Oscar Piastri said this after five wins in his victory in Saudi Arabia, you believed him. The 24-year-old is the new F1 iceman, and even if he could justly please how the first six weeks of the season unfold, he clearly can’t flap his wings, whether he’s facing a victory, disaster, or something in between.
It’s as if Piastri skipped a year or returned to school after summer vacation. In the preseason, the questions surrounding him were whether he could take another step and consistently match or defeat McLaren’s teammates and title favourite Rand Norris. The high standards for his best works were obvious to everyone. The only question was whether he could be relentlessly strong at the point of his performance peak. He replied with emphasis, and now it appears to be a completed article.
The sample set is too small – five race weekends over six weeks – to draw a decisive conclusion, piastry trends are encouraging, to say the least. He had a 10-point lead and was a quiet, calm center for McLaren’s season, but his teammate Norris sometimes shook in the problematic waters.
Each of the five races so far proves something about piastry. In Australia, the home driver never scored a top three finish in the era of the World Championships (the 2014 Daniel Ricciardo’s runner-up spot, closest to being stripped away for a fuel flow brooch), Piastri put pressure on Norris. That is, the McLaren driver flew out of the truck on turn 14 when the rain returned on lap 44. Piastri spins when they meet again on a winning shot and get second. Looking back at the weekend, he felt he had scored the points.
“It hurts after the race, but there were a lot of positives from the whole weekend,” Piastri said. “Through all the practice and qualifying, I really built the weekend well and performed in qualifying as well. It wasn’t much different from last year, but my personal feelings weren’t that strong. Overtaking.”
Not only did he beat Norris after overtaking Max Verstappen, who won the Grand Prix and finished second in the sprint, but he was one of the most struggling tracks in 2024 on his first visit to the Shanghai Circuit. McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella cited this as a confirmation of Piastri’s big step.
“He’s improved over the winter,” Stella said after Piastri won there. “There was a lot of work, a long list of opportunities, a long list of races you will review. Here we should do this, these adaptations. The biggest sign of his progress was 12 months ago, after a race in China, scratching our heads and saying, “Choose many people from learning from this race.”
His ’24 performance had a mitigation factor, but the car that plunged into neutral with his sprint qualifying laps and damage was struggling all weekend, called the “peaky” truck surface in terms of grip, especially when Daniel Ricciardo’s car was pushed behind McLaren by a walk by Lance. Resurfacing, which made the track faster in ’25, means it’s not a direct comparison, but that wasn’t the only struggle last year. He also has a second chance to confirm his progress on the truck where he had troubles before Formula 1 went to Barcelona in June.
At Suzuka he finished third behind Norris, with both McLarens bottled behind Verstappen. A disappointing result, he felt he was faster than Norris (a difficult claim to demonstrate given that both are limited by being in the way, and Suzuki was a track where his tire management was a problem in the past. It was in his game realm, and like all rookies, he evolved dramatically until he seemed to be on a similar level as Norris everywhere. Piastri wasn’t short in Japan, but he had a higher pole position and chances of victory on him in turn 2 in the second quarter, but the speed of both his one-lap and race stints was revealed.
Norris then flushes at McLaren’s request and hits third place, but this came Bahrain, which was a weekend of crushing control. By contrast, Piastri’s seven days later victory in Saudi Arabia was the weekend when he was the second fastest McLaren driver, but avoided the failure of his teammate crash in the third quarter. He missed Paul’s position, but he jumped Verstappen in the start, clung his head to the first corner, closing the victory in what he called a “difficult race.” You can claim that he was lucky, but to be a driver who wins a normal victory and title victory, you need to be enough to win a weekend where you are not at your best. That five race set revealed a lot about the piastry. Speaking at McLaren’s Silverstone launch in February, he summed up his goal by saying, “to increase resilience to allow him to adapt a little faster over the weekend.” The fact that he has not been missing in any of the five events so far confirms that what happened when he was wealthy from Norris’s level, especially in 2024, has taken the qualifying step that Norris destroyed him.
“Oscar is confident in qualifying,” said Stella of Jeddah. “He can put things together. He has more awareness. It comes with experience and all the analysis that has been done over the winter.
“What I’m looking at, and I’m still two drivers who look at so many telemetry on their own, pushing each other against each other. They’re pretty much complementary about where they get faster and slower. So they can see a lot of opportunities. And I see synergies, synergies mean promotions in the game.”
There is a hint that Piastry may have better equipment to make profits from now on than Norris. Norris is a driver who has endlessly experimented with driving techniques and built a scary toolkit, but has been able to perform a brilliantly managed race stint for a long time, but has struggled to reach perfection in qualifying. The presence of drivers like Piastri, which can be done in certain corners and become faster, is a potential to encourage him to overreach, but perhaps Australians can focus on embracing him in a slower place and making the most of what he can do.
Norris, for example, was not achieved in sprint qualifying in China after trying to attack more hairpin. Similarly, was his third quarter crash in Saudi Arabia caused by Piastri trying to match the speed at which it was carried left and right in turn 4-5? He was 12km/h faster than previous attempts, ununderstandable and was thrown into the barrier when the front end bits and transitioned oversteer.
This highlights two aspects that make the piastry seem stronger than Norris. One is well published. In other words, his ability to carry speed to slow corners requires a combination of brakes/turning, in which Norris sometimes suffers from the feel. The simple reason for this is that the piercing tends to go towards a classic “V-style” approach at slower angles, with lower minimum speeds but more attacking entries, while Norris is “U-style”, maintaining minimum speeds but extending corners. Both are adaptable, but that’s one of the areas Norris struggled with forever.
The other area is piastry mentality. So, since he is horizontally adjacent, he appears completely indifferent to what is going on. That means he’s cool under pressure, not easily distracted, and has a sobering ruthlessness that can give the edge of pressure points. There are two examples of this value from the 2024 race that highlights these strengths. One was his race move moving Charles LeClair’s Ferrari to the first corner of Baku when he was recently advised by race engineer Tom Stallard to introduce him to a carefully bolted hard Pirellis. It was healthy engineering advice, but Piastri reversed it with his race head. Once he got it, he defended stubbornly.
The second example was last year’s Monza. After that, Norris still wanted to fill the point gap to Verstappen, with Piastri being the support act. McLaren engaged the infamous “Papaya Rules,” but Norris took the lead when Piastri plunged him into the second Shikne on the opening lap. This allowed Norris to run through the corner and Leclair to pass away. It was definitely an overly offensive move from his teammates, but the team later confirmed that it wasn’t against the rules.
This is what makes piastry so dangerous. It’s his ruthlessness. He appears to have a psychological profile alongside many world champions. He is confident, decisive and assertive. Using a phrase popularized by legendary German football manager Jurgen Klopp in Liverpool, Piastri is a “mentality monster,” but Norris appears to be more fragile. This could be two important differences in the championship fight: passing the initiative to Piastri. Again, it can also be pointed out that Norris is very publicly pondering to the Hungary orders that McLaren’s careful strategy last year gave him an unnatural track position advantage over Piastri. He denied taking this seriously, but it showed that he was oversimplifying to those who claimed he had no champion psychology.
None of this proves that the piastry has a number of Norris. At least, it’s not yet. His points lead is just 10, and the worst result for Piastri – 9th in Australia is much worse than Norris’s fourth low-water mark in Saudi Arabia. That’s an important question given that his campaign was so badly kicked out last year, but when we extrapolated from what we’ve seen so far, he checks out the box.
Also, he looks mentally rock solid from the outside, but the strength of the title fight tests him more than ever. Everyone has a breaking point, but Norris is very publicly admitted that he is sometimes vulnerable, but he has also proven that he can bounce back quickly.
No one is really sure what’s going on in someone else’s head. While Piastry seems impossible to derail, I don’t know if there’s a series of situations that could defeat the course. So far, the evidence suggests that this is not the case, but 2025 needs to be unfolded to confirm that. And even people within the team have personally realized that if season trends continue so far, the pair are very likely to escalate their friendly, cooperative, rivalry into something more disruptive, if the trends of the season continue to this point. I don’t know how Piastri and Norris will respond in that situation.
For now, what we can conclude is that Piastri has probably made a greater progress than even his team expected. And it managed to take him to the World Championships in 2025.