Three wins from five from Oscar Piastri so far this season, his victory in Jeddah putting him in the lead of the world championship for the first time in his short career. His maturation into someone capable of winning a world title has coincided neatly with McLaren starting the season with the fastest car for the first time in decades. In ’23 and ’24 he very often displayed great potential but his data banks were simply not full enough to allow him to access that potential every time he was in the car. So the performances were a little patchy as he decoded the various puzzles of F1, not least the tyres. But that didn’t matter so much when McLaren didn’t have a potentially title-contending car. Now that it has, he is ready. It’s as if preordained.
By contrast, his team-mate Lando Norris, arriving in F1 four years before Piastri, had reached a consistently super-high level sometime before McLaren had made a full recovery from the doldrums. By the time of Piastri’s arrival, Norris was getting everything from the car pretty much every time. He’d reached the level of maturity and experience Piastri has just arrived at now. But for all that he was consistently exploiting the car, Norris hadn’t felt the heat of a title fight, hadn’t been annealed by it.
He got his first little taste of that intense heat last year as the McLaren came on strong from Miami onwards. But Max Verstappen had such a big points lead by then that it was never really a battle. Even so, cracks appeared in Norris’ game as the pressure was loaded upon him. They needed to be eliminated, but so far this season they have reappeared, this is never more evident than in his qualifying crash in Jeddah last weekend. He’d been the pacesetter throughout the weekend, fastest by a comfortable margin every time he ran, not even needing to do the two runs in Q1 and Q2 that everyone else did but just sitting confidently in the garage. Then the disastrous crash, confidence flipping into over-confidence and just like that the weekend was Piastri’s.
Norris’s crash at Jeddah derailed a weekend he could have dominated
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Oscar had not at any point allowed Norris’ small apparent pace advantage there to niggle him. “Yeah, there’s a few corners in which I need to do a better job,” he shrugged after Friday practice, “but overall pretty good.” That laid-back persona can be misleading, has in the past led some to believe he wasn’t pissed off enough when things weren’t going well. But it’s just the other side of the same quality which allows him to retain total composure even on the bad weekends. He will not always be the faster McLaren driver, as he very definitely was in Bahrain for the previous race.
With a team-mate as fast as Norris, it’s inevitable the underlying pace advantage will swing between them, but Piastri appears to encompass this comfortably into his game. It’s as if he is already in championship mode, eyes firmly fixed on the big prize and not letting small disturbances impact upon him. Right now, it’s as if he’s the seasoned old pro and Norris the super-fast but error-prone rookie.
There’s a fascinating compare and contrast to be made here between Piastri and his manager Mark Webber. Before Piastri’s Saudi win, the last time an Australian led the world championship was Webber in 2010. With three races to go, he was narrowly ahead on points from Red Bull team-mate Sebastian Vettel, Ferrari‘s Fernando Alonso and McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton.
He’d been at Red Bull since long before it was a title-contending team, often delivering qualifying performances way above the car’s natural level, just as he had when it was the Jaguar team. Vettel’s arrival there in 2009 coincided with the team making the competitive breakthrough and all of a sudden Webber seemed to be the support driver – at least that’s how it felt to him as Helmut Marko was bowled over by the youngster’s speed. Today at McLaren, it’s Webber’s protégé Piastri playing the young arriviste and Piastri’s title rival Norris the long-termer there since before the car was fast having to deal with the new reality.
Vettel’s arrival at Red Bull made Webber a supposed support driver
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Webber was a fascinating performer, devastatingly fast when everything was right, incredible through big-commitment fast corners but like a highly-strung racehorse prone to be freaked by outside events. Then there was the counter-intuitive technique required to fully exploit a new technology, the Red Bull’s blown diffuser, which team-mate Vettel became so good at, giving him a fully repeatable slow corner advantage over Webber.
Max Verstappen lost his chance of winning the Saudi Arabian GP after being penalised for his Turn 1 incident. But would he have stayed on track given him a chance of winning or was it all lost at the start? Mark Hughes analyses the Jeddah race
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Mark Hughes
But a little like Nigel Mansell, Mark was at his best with a chip on his shoulder, when it was him against the world out to prove all the disbelievers wrong, and there had been several such days in 2010. The most outstanding was probably his brilliant victory at Silverstone after a row about which driver got the new front wing. Webber dominated that race despite being in a lot of pain from the bruising he’d received at Valencia when he’d flipped at terrifyingly high speed as he was lapping Heikki Kovalainen’s Lotus. Webber’s “Not bad for a number two,” radio comment on the Silverstone slow-down lap encapsulated him perfectly.
Compared to Piastri, Webber was more hair-trigger. Deeply, deeply competitive and wanted it so badly that he could sometimes over-strive. He was 14 points clear of Vettel at the head of the table going into Korea, round 17 of the 20-race championship. He had no need to be trying so hard to stay with leader Vettel in the appalling visibility of the wet race and his crash effectively lost him the title. It was a devastating psychological blow and in the remaining races, he couldn’t recapture his earlier form.
Although Norris’ unforced qualifying error in Jeddah is at a very early stage of the season and not necessarily decisive, Webber will surely have understood exactly what Norris was going through in the aftermath and know just what a massive psychological swing towards Piastri it represented.
