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‘That’s all I need’: Bitter irony as Piastri faces thorny team orders reality in Norris title shot It was 12 months ago Oscar Piastri put one hand on the championship trophy that so many assumed would be his by the end of the season. He’d just dominated the Dutch Grand Prix to take a 34-point title lead over teammate Lando Norris, whose engine had popped in the late stages of the Zandvoort race. With no-one else within 100 points of the leader and with nine rounds to go, the Australian’s trajectory seemed set. Fox Sports, available on Kayo Sports, is the only place to watch every practice, qualifying session and race in the 2026 FIA Formula One World Championship™ LIVE in 4K. New to Kayo? Join now and get your first month for just $1. But even the most cautious of prognosticators wouldn’t have foreseen that comfortable victory being Piastri’s last to date. His season wobbled and then collapsed shortly afterwards, with his dire run of results combined with good Norris form to put the Englishman in the lead. We know how it ended. But Norris’s 2025 title comeback so nearly wasn’t the story of the championship. Verstappen’s charge home was. The four-time champion was 104 points behind Piastri after the Netherlands and had long ago been counted out of contention. No driver had succeeded in coming back from such a margin over such a sustained period. He fell two points short of Norris at the final race — but he finished 11 points ahead of Piastri, a 115-point turnaround on the Australian. The remarkable feat has completely changed the understanding of what’s possible in modern Formula 1, when fluctuating form has become the norm. So what should be made of Norris’s shrunk title margin? The defending champion has already had his campaign written off by public consensus, with the points gap too large and the McLaren car too uncompetitive to recover ground. But his deficit is ‘only’ 83 points — and whereas nine rounds remained after last year’s Dutch Grand Prix, there could be as many as 11 still on the cards this season. If it could be true last year, why not this year? CONTROLLABLE: WHAT HE NEEDS FROM McLAREN “I’m happy,” Norris said after qualifying on pole on Saturday. “I’m optimistic. I still believe that it’s possible, and that’s all I need for now.” That Norris is even contemplating a title charge says a lot about the belief inside McLaren, even if he’s remaining cautious. “At the minute I don’t have the car I need to fight for a championship,” he said. “I know that’s quite a big comment, but I think last year I understood what is needed from a car and what was needed for myself. “I know just what I need from the car, and I know what tracks we have coming up where we’re going to certainly struggle more, and I don’t want to struggle more.” As has been the case in previous years, McLaren’s biggest strength this season is in the high-speed corners, where the car is creating prodigious levels of downforce. That comes in exchange for high drag, however, making the car weak in a straight line. It’s also poor in slow-speed corners. Coming up next is Monza, which is all straight lines joined by slow chicanes. Azerbaijan comes two rounds later, with its long straights and 90-degree bends, and the slow Singapore street track is another two rounds after that. “As soon as it kind of gets proper tight and twisty, this is when the car doesn’t like it,” Norris said. “If we can improve on these slow speeds, I’m confident that I can win every race this season. If we don’t, then it’s much more difficult to believe so. “Until we do that, it’s still going to be a very tough end of the season.” Team boss Andrea Stella was similarly cautious. “Before we fill this [points] gap, we have to have so many of these good weekends that I’d rather at the moment focus on executing good weekends and bringing more upgrades to the car,” he told Sky Sports. “After some of that, if we are able to, then we will look at where we are in the championship. “We have to do a little bit more to give them a fight.” UNCONTROLLABLE: WHAT HE NEEDS FROM MERCEDES Antonelli’s lead is big enough that Norris cannot win on his own; he needs the Italian to make mistakes. Norris could win every remaining race, but Antonelli could finish second in all of them without losing top spot. It’s much the same as last year. Verstappen’s monumental comeback was the work of a four-time world champion at the peak of his powers — and of a team that dedicated extra resource to a car at the end of its development life — but it also required McLaren to crack under pressure. And McLaren fully obliged. “We were on the not-so-good end of it last year,” Norris said, reflecting on his position as the hunter, as Verstappen had been last season. “It’s nice to know that it’s a possibility, and of course I’m hoping both Mercedes get a double DSQ in Vegas like we did and decide not to box in Qatar for a free pit stop. “So as long as they make the same mistakes, it’ll probably be just as easy.” He can laugh about it now, having come through the other side unscathed, but it shouldn’t be forgotten how serious some of those critical errors were. In Las Vegas McLaren catastrophically miscalibrated the car such that it wore down its plank — the device that controls ride height — too much, with both drivers disqualified. Norris had finished second behind Verstappen in the race to steady the gap between them at 42 points with two rounds remaining — a mathematical chance only. Disqualification slashed that gap to 24 points — far more achievable. The team followed that up with a strategic howler in Qatar, where it failed to pit Piastri and Norris behind an early safety car when every other driver did, costing Piastri a victory and allowing Verstappen to take another 10 points out of his deficit for the final race. Those blunders go with other strategic irritations that can generally be filed under ‘papaya rules’, the internal racing guidelines with which the team attempted to keep the fight fair but instead ended up becoming increasingly interventionist as the season wore on. Mercedes, by contrast, issued its first team orders of the year in the Netherlands, and though Russell attempted to argue the point, he and Antonelli suggested after the race that both knew exactly how it was going to play out — that is, the racing code was clear to both of them. Whether Mercedes can be relied upon to make McLaren 2025-spec unforced errors remains to be seen, but so far the team has looked as well drilled as it was in its title-winning golden age. The only other key question about Mercedes’s season is how much upgrade firepower it has remaining. McLaren has suggested it won’t have another major update for some time, while the paddock is braced for Mercedes to unleash its first major changes since May. But on Sunday team boss Toto Wolff suggested Mercedes was out of budget to fast-track any big upgrades, even as reports suggest the team is targeting a step in early October. Right now the teams are roughly equal in pace. Whoever rolls the dice last could end up with a lasting and decisive advantage. CONTROLLABLE: NORRIS’S DRIVING LEVEL The need for Mercedes to fumble its hand is part of the reason Norris — like Verstappen last year — can’t get ahead of himself. All Norris can do, then, is control the controllables — try to take poles and win races. The quality of his driving has been obscured somewhat by reliability and a substandard McLaren for much of the season, but since getting his hands on a race-winning car, there’s been no doubting how good he’s been. Stella said Norris is “driving like the world champion he is”. “He is now expressing a higher level of assertiveness,” he said, per The Race. “He is demonstrating more self-confidence, and this is interesting, and I quite like it. “It’s confidence in your means, in your strength … which means that sometimes you are actually the one backing off when the situation becomes too risky. “We need to remember that in both of the last couple of races that he won, he didn’t defend the pole position [on lap one] — he was actually second at the end of the first lap — but I did not hear or perceive any decay in his confidence as to the fact that he was faster; he was just preparing his opportunity [rather] than cashing in on his self-confidence. “Assertiveness and confidence are probably the two characteristics that he has improved the most from a non-technical, non-operational point of view.” Norris, typically self-critical, was willing to give himself a pat on the back. “I feel like I’m doing a better job than everyone, and I think that can also make a difference,” he said. For supporting evidence, look no further than the opposite side of the garage, where Oscar Piastri is struggling for traction while his title-winning teammate soars. UNTHINKABLE? WHAT HE NEEDS FROM HIS TEAMMATE That brings us to the thorniest issue. Piastri’s season has been far from woeful, with some standout performances and well-judged opportunism scattered throughout. Though Norris has a handy 8-4 head-to-head qualifying lead, on average there’s been just 0.06s between them over a single lap this season. But there’s no escaping the fact Piastri has lacked race pace for much of this season. That’s especially been the case since McLaren got its race-winning car upgrade. Whatever the reason, he’s now a chunky 55 points behind Norris, which means he’s 138 points off the title lead — mathematically possible but far out of his hands. At some point McLaren will have to contemplate the question of team orders to benefit Norris’s challenge. It’s unthinkable after last year, when the team tied itself in knots attempting to avoid prioritising one driver over the other, but these are very different circumstances. In fact it’s remarkable how similar this is to the team’s 2024 quandary. Pressure on the team to throw its weight behind Norris after that year’s Dutch Grand Prix, where he reduced his deficit to 70 points with nine rounds remaining (7.8 points per round) — that’s almost identical to today’s 83-point deficit with 11 scheduled rounds remaining (7.5 points per round). Piastri was 46 points (5.1 points per round) behind Norris in 2025 — again, almost identical to his 55-point deficit (5.0 points per round) this season. The team’s decision was complicated by Piastri being in better form than Norris at the time, but one round later, ahead of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, McLaren declared “collaborative” discussions had led to Piastri being prepared to sacrifice results to benefit his teammate. Ironically the opposite happened that weekend, with an out-of-position Norris holding up Sergio Pérez to help Piastri secure a standout victory in Baku. Team orders came into play later in the season, most memorably when Piastri handed Norris a victory in the Sao Paulo sprint. It ultimately amounted to nothing, however. McLaren wobbled, and Verstappen scored some steadying victories that saw him crowned with two rounds to spare. It was perhaps a cautionary tale in believing the concept of a ‘number one driver’ is a title panacea. After all, Piastri can’t give Norris positions if he’s already behind him, and deploying a driver specifically to play interference works in only specific situations and at only some circuits. In some respects the decision is harder than in 2024, when Piastri was in only his second season and his reputation was still that of a junior driver. Today he’s fully fledged and a highly respected competitor regardless of his difficulties this season. But you could also argue the call is easier today. The trend is clearer than in 2024, and McLaren knows better what it takes — and what mistakes to avoid — in fighting for the title. Few bar the most one-eyed of Norris fans would think this is the time to make the call. McLaren still must prove the car can be competitive at a broader range of circuits, and it has to fend off renewed challenges from Ferrari and Mercedes. But if the car is competitive again in Monza, there’ll be precious few reasons to doubt the team’s title bona fides — and if Piastri remains a step behind Norris, you can bet questions about championship priority will begin being asked. But what a bitter irony it would be for Piastri just 12 months since the championship trophy briefly appeared to be within his grasp.