Despite starting the 2025 season with a Grand Prix win, Lando Norris’ form has been on a downward trend. In the following four race weekends, the Briton has been quite scrappy with underpar qualifying performances and has had to put in recovery drives; his teammate, Oscar Piastri, on the other hand, has racked up three wins in the past four races.
Thanks to such brilliant form, the Melbourne-born driver has outscored Norris by 33 points in the past four weekends, and also taken the lead in the drivers’ championship standings by 10 points from his teammate after his win in Saudi Arabia last weekend. Norris’ performance in Jeddah was quite disappointing as he crashed out at a crucial juncture in Q3.
As a result, he only ended up P10 while Piastri qualified on the front row before taking the win on Sunday. However, there is a reason for Norris’ struggles. He isn’t as comfortable with the MCL39’s performance as Piastri.
The Briton highlighted how their car isn’t as quick as people perceive it to be, with rival teams being close to their performance benchmark. However, Piastri doesn’t agree with Norris’ sentiments.
The Aussie stated after his win in Jeddah that McLaren still have the fastest car on average, while teams like Red Bull and Ferrari are closing in on their pace at particular track layouts like Suzuka and Jeddah. Now, this difference of opinion between the McLaren drivers about the car’s performance is reminiscent of Daniel Ricciardo’s position back in 2021-22.
ESPN’s Nate Saunders highlighted this similarity on the Unlapped podcast and stated that Norris is finding himself in Ricciardo’s position of struggling to extract the maximum out of the car. “I think Oscar [Piastri] has probably surprised him [Lando Norris] in a similar way to how Lando surprised Daniel Ricciardo when he came to McLaren that year,” he said.
Lando Norris doesn’t know why people are still surprised by Red Bull and Ferrari’s pace: pic.twitter.com/JvdflCGRpi
— The Race (@wearetherace) April 20, 2025
Back then, the Honey Badger was not able to adapt to McLaren’s different car concept, which Norris was able to handle quite smoothly. Consequently, Ricciardo struggled immensely to match the Briton’s performances across the 2021 and 2022 seasons.
“In that instance, Ricciardo struggled with that; he wasn’t happy with the car and Lando was, and it spiraled down,” Saunders added.
While Norris’ situation doesn’t seem to be as bad as the Perth-born driver’s as of yet, his mental state and the negative connotations in his comments aren’t showing good signs for the future. “I’m not going to be able to necessarily drive like I did last year and like I know I’m good at,” Norris said in Jeddah last weekend.
“Which is weird to say in my seventh season of F1 but I’m still learning things, the car is definitely different to how it’s been, so I’m having to adapt a lot in uncomfortable ways,” Norris added.
These points of changing his natural driving style to adapt to the car reflect the same sentiments Ricciardo used to highlight in 2021-22 when he was Norris’ teammate at McLaren. Back then, the British driver did not have any sympathy for the eight-time Grand Prix winner and minded his own business.
Three years later, Piastri is giving Norris a similar treatment as the Melbourne-born driver would want to focus on his championship ambitions. And given the kind of performances he has strung together, it seems quite plausible that Piastri could become a world champion before Norris, despite only being in his third F1 season this year.
