Lando Norris is not a man to hide his emotions. At various points during a scrappy Bahrain Grand Prix weekend, he admitted that he was not doing a good enough job. After another mistake in qualifying, he said he felt like he had never driven a Formula One car before.
After victory in the opening race in Australia, Norris is enduring a tricky period. More worryingly, though, he does not appear to have dispelled his demons from the second half of 2024. Back then, he was criticised for his lack of ruthlessness in wheel-to-wheel racing and failing too often to convert the fastest car into victory.
His third place on Sunday was a messy affair, incurring a five-second penalty and several failed overtakes. Norris still leads the championship by three points from team-mate and race-winner Oscar Piastri but appears to be repeating the mistakes of last season. In the battle for supremacy at McLaren, there has been a turnaround.
In their previous two seasons together at McLaren, Piastri was comfortably second best. He scored 97 points to Norris’s 205 in his debut season in 2023 and trailed 292 to 374 last year. Norris also notched four wins to his team-mate’s two in 2024.
Already in 2025, Piastri appears to have addressed his biggest weaknesses and looks a far tougher rival. Given the all-round strength of this year’s McLaren, this battle will likely decide the next title, and it is Piastri who is driving more like a world champion.
Since Norris’s Melbourne victory, there has been a 20-point swing in Piastri’s favour. You could even make the argument that Piastri deserves to be leading the standings. After all, both McLaren drivers made the same error in Australia – almost simultaneously – yet Norris got away with it more lightly and won the race. Piastri was stuck on the grass for an age and had to fight back to ninth and two points. Since then, it is Norris whose performances have been littered with small but costly errors. Piastri, by contrast, looks untroubled and at ease with the car.
High expectations could be taking toll
After the race on Sunday, Norris wondered if something had changed in the McLaren that has made the car more difficult for him to drive. His team principal, Andrea Stella, also suggested he could be struggling to deal with characteristics in the 2025 car that were not there last year.
Yet perhaps it is as simple as Norris over-driving because he knows he is in a car that should win the championship. That was something Charles Leclerc was guilty of when he found himself in a fast Ferrari early in his career. He has had to learn to temper that and sometimes go slower to go faster. Whatever the issue with Norris, something has definitely changed with Piastri.
One area where Piastri has improved enormously is over one flying lap. In the 30 sprint and grand prix qualifying sessions in 2024, Norris beat Piastri 25-5. The Australian was rarely that distant in ultimate lap time but overall Norris dominated. This year Piastri is 0.141sec faster on average and leads 3-2. The margins are small, but on the two occasions Piastri has qualified behind Norris he has been just one grid slot back. On the three times Piastri has out-qualified his team-mate, Norris has been three, two and five slots behind respectively.
Piastri’s average qualifying position is 2.0 (the best of the field), Norris’s is 3.6 (third, behind Verstappen). That has helped Piastri take six points (China sprint), seven points (Chinese GP) and 10 points (Bahrain) from the Briton’s championship lead, whilst only losing three points in Japan.
Another area Piastri has improved greatly is managing his tyres. In 2023 and 2024 he would often match the pace of Norris for the first (often shorter) stint, and then fade as the race progressed. That no longer appears to be the case, even when running behind Norris, as was shown in both Australia and Suzuka.
Norris too critical of himself
There is also a mental factor. As Gary Anderson points out in his column, Norris appears to be easily flustered. He is also critical of himself to the point of self-flagellation when he makes errors of any magnitude. That is unhelpful and risks him entering a dangerous spiral. In contrast, you would struggle to find a more laid-back character on the grid than Piastri, who is understated in his every word and action.
This demeanour does not mean Piastri lacks killer instinct. Far from it. We saw it at Monza last year when he overtook Norris at the second chicane, compromising his team-mate’s race and championship hopes. Does Norris have that? He has shown it at times – a brilliant first lap in Bahrain saw him jump from sixth to third, let us not forget – but has failed to fully deliver on it.
“Every time I did one thing good, I did two things bad,” Norris said after the race. “I just kept stopping myself from making as much progress as I should have done today.”
He must ensure that his assessment from Bahrain does not become a microcosm of his entire season. There are still 20 races in this championship and its destination is still in Norris’s talented hands.