McLaren F1 rivalry given new light as stars race to championship title

Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris' drivers' championship battle is really the only thing to look forward to in F1 after the summer break.

No other teams are challenging McLaren for constructors' glory, while the papaya team's four consecutive one-two finishes before the summer break may just have disheartened the likes of Max Verstappen and George Russell - the only two non-McLaren drivers to have won a grand prix in 2025.

Piastri heads into the summer break with a nine-point lead over Norris in the standings, and has claimed six wins compared to Norris' five.

But beyond all of the race victories, there is the argument that this championship race is turning into a tortoise vs hare-type battle; and that may just make the battle even more exciting in the remaining 10 races.

Piastri's impressive consistency

Piastri is the only racer to have scored points in every race throughout 2025, with his ninth-place finish at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix being his worst grand prix finish of the season.

His consistency in his eight non-race winning races has been mightily impressive, taking six additional podiums alongside that ninth-place finish and a fourth-place finish at the Canadian GP.

If you take out the first race of the season, where he was undone by some treacherous conditions at his home race, Piastri has scored 282 points across 13 race weekends.

It has been this consistency that has kept him ahead of Norris in the standings, despite the Brit currently being on a hot streak of winning three of the last four grands prix.

Norris' stunning drives

For Norris, his strength has been simply having so much raw pace at certain tracks compared to Piastri.

At a number of races this year, Norris has turned up to the track on the Friday, and you just knew that he is going to ace the weekend.

That feeling was felt at Monaco and, in particular, Austria, where he took pole position by over half a second at a track that is known to be one of the shortest on the calendar.

It's this raw pace that must leave Piastri feeling a bit deflated at certain tracks, and feeling that second might just be the best he can do throughout the weekend, but it also can be this raw pace that can cause silly mistakes from the Brit.

It was clear that he was the faster of the two drivers during the race in Canada, yet while pushing for an overtake, Norris took himself out of the race with a silly move. Piastri scored 12 points that weekend while Norris scored zero. That's pretty much the gap between them, showing quite how costly a mistake like that can be.

Norris has had more second-place results than Piastri across the season, which may hint at a strong level of consistency, but a lot of those have been very winnable events that the Brit has thrown away through a poor qualifying.

In China, for example, he let George Russell qualify in between him and Piastri, while in Bahrain, he qualified down in sixth, only allowing himself to recover to third spot while Piastri took a dominant victory.

That right there was a 10-point swing between the pair, again almost the exact gap between them in the standings.

Who will win the championship?

All of this talk of a slightly more inconsistent Norris can probably be caveated by the fact that he is the only one of the two to have been involved in a championship battle in the latter stages of a season before.

His title fight with Max Verstappen last year went right down to the last few races, but it was some rather unfortunate errors that stopped him from properly putting the pressure on the Dutchman. Norris will have learnt from that experience, and will surely be using the summer break to better prepare for the last 10 races this time around.

However, part of the reason that he eventually lost out on the title in 2024 was Verstappen's ability to maximise his results, even when he didn't have the car to be challenging for race wins.

It was that consistency that became Verstappen's saviour, and it was a similar consistency to what we have seen through Piastri this season up until this point.

Nico Rosberg's ability to maximise results in 2016 while Lewis Hamilton was suffering with reliability issues was also crucial to his championship victory over the Brit that year.

Therefore, we have had evidence in the recent past that it is the tortoise that often wins in these end of season scenarios.

Although I'm not quite sure we can call Verstappen or Rosberg a tortoise!

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