Does Piastri think McLaren may be favouring Norris over him? F1 Q&A

The title race is still far away with only one point, with only four races remaining, between Norris and team-mate Oscar Piastri.

Max Verstappen of Red Bull is also actively looking for points, only 36 points off the lead, but squandering that advantage.

Oscar Piastri hasn’t been the same since Monza, when Lando Norris had to come back after a slow pit stop. Has it become apparent to Oscar that Lando and McLaren are in love with each other? Lando has been nurtured by McLaren through all the junior formula, after all. – Rob

Because it appears to have a strong following among some fans, it’s worthwhile to go into great detail about this.

Piastri has dealt with this question of favouritism already. He was directly questioned in Austin about his happiness that the team lacked none. He responded, “I’m pleased there is no favoritism or bias.”

McLaren Racing chief executive officer Zak Brown has also addressed it. He said, “Nonsense,” in an interview with BBC Sport in Austin.

The two races that appear to have caused this to become a problem, Hungary and Italy, were then covered in more detail.

He acknowledged: “You’re right, it appears the couple incidents that have happened most recently have kind of fallen Lando’s way”.

He went on to explain why those races weren’t deliberate favoritism.

According to Brown, the Hungarian Grand Prix was a free punt because of how the race was going. Norris defeated Piastri in the first lap by using a one-stop strategy after falling back to fifth on the first lap.

On the pit wall at the time, neither he nor team principal Andrea Stella believed it would work.

You’ll hear the pit-wall conversation, Brown said, “I wish Netflix]Drive to Survive was here right now.”

Andrea and I both said, “This ain’t going to work.” But Lando drove brilliantly. And I don’t believe it would have worked if there had been another track with less of a passing craze, right? You can’t pass on this track, really.

Of Monza, where McLaren ordered Piastri to cede second place to Norris, who had lost it following the combination of a deliberate reversal of pit-stop order and then a slow pit-stop late in the race, Brown said that was “just like happened in Hungary the year before”, where Norris ceded the win to Piastri.

That’s great teamwork, he said, if the lead car is willing to risk their rights to the first call to assist his teammate, who is actually his top championship competitor.

“And we did that in a fierce race to protect Oscar, which is actually to Lando’s detriment. Then we had the pit-stop issue.

Everyone believes that the pit stop caused the order to be reversed. That was unrelated to the situation at hand. So the challenge then becomes you almost can’t explain everything all the time, and people jump to conclusions.

We’re working so hard to give them equal opportunity and let them race hard, but I don’t understand what it looks like from the outside.

I would like more people to recognize that. But I’ve definitely come to the conclusion there’s too many fans with too many views, (and) that we’ve just got to be comfortable with how we’re going racing inside McLaren, and that’s what’s most important to us. “

Piastri’s performance, as the question suggests, isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems. Yes, he crashed three times and jumped the gun in Baku during the course of the weekend. Both McLaren drivers struggled there, and while Piastri seemed less comfortable than Norris, he was not massively slower.

Before the incident at the first corner, for which Norris was unnamed, in Austin, Piastri qualified two places ahead in Singapore.

However, it is true that Piastri’s performance in Austin and Mexico was inconsistent. Piastri and the team say this was down to the car needing to be driven differently in the specific conditions there.

In a post-qualifying review in Mexico, Stella claimed that they “extracted some crucial information” regarding how the car should be driven in these unique, low-grip conditions that Austin and other countries are experiencing.

He continued, “It seems like you have to drive the car in a way that adapts to the car’s tendency to slide and create lap time in this regime.” And this is not necessarily the way in which Oscar feels naturally that he is producing lap time.

We then identified a few things he and we could do together, according to the statement.

Piastri once said, “It’s undoubtedly been a learning experience. For some reason, the last couple of weekends have required a very different way of driving.

Is Red Bull’s improvement since Christian Horner left just coincidence? Or has the leadership change allowed for the talent to be used to deliver the upgrades? – Dave

Consequence and cause are not necessarily the same thing. However, in this situation, it’s difficult to tell the difference between the two, but there is also a possibility that there is some correlation.

Laurent Mekies, the new team’s principal, has stated that his contribution to the team’s improvement in performance has been “absolutely zero,” and that his efforts have been aided by Max Verstappen’s feedback and the engineers’ efforts to understand the car.

Verstappen said in Singapore:” Laurent is probably being too nice in that sense. The only thing that makes it work well is that we just do it as a team.

“We made an effort to examine the details.” We tried to understand what our weaknesses were. And it’s definitely picked up a lot since a few races.

You may feel a little lost when you leave a race without fully understanding why or how. I do think that now we understand why or how we can be better. And it just works well by asking the right questions, including Laurent’s involvement in that.

Red Bull struggled a little in Mexico to stay competitive, but McLaren team principal Andrea Stella thought it might be more about cooling than a specific car-related issue.

McLaren put a lot of effort into cooling on their 2025 car, to ensure that it cooled efficiently without needing to open up holes in the bodywork, which causes a performance deficit.

The quality of your cooling system is crucial, according to Stella, because the loss of aerodynamic efficiency can occur quite quickly if you have to compromise aerodynamics to achieve sufficient cooling.

Therefore, Mexico is not a place to evaluate a car because performance might be affected by a cooling effect.

Could we witness a situation where a good lap was deliberately delayed during qualifying to stop another driver from leaving just in time to beat them? – Peter

Of course that sort of thing is always possible, but the ritual of leaving the pit lane is well understood by now, so anything like this would be very obvious and is likely to lead to a penalty.

In addition, a safety precaution was used to introduce the queuing system.

For obvious reasons, drivers want to have a gap in front of the car both on the outgoing lap and on the qualifying lap themselves to ensure they can get their tire preparation as best as possible.

But doing this out on the track was creating dangerous situations, with drivers crawling along at various points on the track while others were on flying laps.

There were a number of near-misses in blind corners, so the FIA set a minimum lap time that drivers had to adhere to on their out laps.

Why did Leclerc and Verstappen lose all of their points when they both gained a lead in Mexico? Does this set the course for the upcoming season when racers can simply run wide and assert ignorance? – Gavin

Because stewards are supposed to be independent, the FIA does not make any comments on stewards’ decisions. Additionally, the stewards are forbidden from discussing them in public. So it’s difficult to get a definitive answer as to the thinking here.

Despite that, explanations do appear to be straightforward.

Leclerc was competing side-by-side with Lewis Hamilton in Turn One when he was struck by a snap of oversteer. By the time he had collected the car, he was already off track.

He almost had to cut the grass because it was impossible to anticipate him returning to the track before Turn Two with the rest of the field behind him.

Given how difficult it is to determine whether he unfairly outperforms Hamilton, and in any case, more leeway is given to first-lap incidents due to how many cars come together so closely.

Verstappen’s case seems even more straightforward.

He was four-wide ahead of George Russell of Mercedes, Lando Norris’ McLaren, and the two Ferraris going into the corner.

Verstappen was forced onto the kerb by the other cars’ left-turn better entry lines, forcing him to follow.

Once on the kerb, he could not brake as effectively as cars on the track, so he locked up and went straight on across the grass. He was attempting to control the car at the back of the run-off area, but he just so happened that he had to go off, and he only managed to pass the wall.

Verstappen ceded position to the two Ferraris, finishing fourth after returning to the track.