On 31 August 2025, Oscar Piastri won the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, while Lando Norris retired with an oil leak. Faced with that bitter disappointment, Norris said all he wanted to do was "grab a burger and go home". He was 34 points behind Piastri in the championship, and my own race report that day carried a headline asking whether Zandvoort had effectively decided the title.
What a difference a year makes.
Looking back now, that world almost feels like some surreal parallel universe. One in which Piastri was on the verge of becoming a Formula 1 world champion; Norris had somehow been labelled the perennial talent who, when push came to shove, could never quite get the job done; Kimi Antonelli had 64 points to George Russell's 184. I will readily admit that I, too, was among those quietly wondering whether Toto Wolff might just have got it wrong with the young Italian after all.
Now, Norris is the world champion, even Nico Rosberg regards Antonelli as something akin to the next Ayrton Senna, and if the most bullish optimists genuinely believe McLaren can still have a say in the 2026 title fight, they are probably thinking of Norris alone.
In the space of 12 months, Piastri has gone from champion-in-the-making to what increasingly feels like McLaren's unofficial number two. His manager Mark Webber, whom many once regarded as an important piece of the puzzle in the Australian's path to the world championship, has seemingly been reduced to a peripheral figure in Team Piastri. And with the 25-year-old finishing 32 seconds behind Norris at Zandvoort and now trailing him by 55 points in the championship, you might think that says everything. Numbers usually don't lie.
Oscar Piastri, McLaren
Photo by: Pauline Ballet - Formula 1
It must hurt Piastri to hear Andrea Stella wax lyrical about Norris fully exploiting his exceptional talent when grip is low and tyres are hard. And then, in the same breath, explain that Piastri has to do things with the 2026 McLaren that go against his natural driving instincts simply to get anywhere near extracting the car's full potential.
Not that Stella is doing anything wrong. The former Ferrari man is probably the most diplomatic team principal in Formula 1. He plays the game of words so skillfully that he would never allow even the faintest impression to emerge that he regards one of his drivers as number one and the other as number two.
But a year on, plenty of those fans who have always insisted on Reddit and elsewhere that Norris was McLaren's secret favourite all along – particularly in the eyes of CEO Zak Brown – now feel vindicated. As if Norris were the first-born son, while Piastri was 'merely' the adopted child they never quite learned to love in the same way.
Oscar Piastri, McLaren
Photo by: Pauline Ballet / LAT Images via Getty Images
It seems unlikely that Piastri has forgotten how to race a car in the space of 12 months. But perhaps one of the reasons he lost the 2025 championship was that, after Zandvoort, the easy-going composure that might have protected him from switching from attack mode to points-management mode in response to his championship lead suddenly disappeared. And because the 2026 generation of Formula 1 cars does not appear to be the kind of toy he most enjoys playing with.
"Unfortunately it's not the first race where the pace just hasn't been there," Piastri sighed after the race as he tried to explain his sixth-place finish in the TV pen. A few metres away, Norris sat all by himself in the FIA press conference, smiling and saying things like: "I'm certainly eliminating my weaknesses on track, and I don't have so many."
When Piastri moved from Renault to McLaren in one of the more controversial transfers in recent Formula 1 history – a contractually convoluted cloak-and-dagger affair – he arrived with the reputation of a potential prodigy. Before reaching Formula 1, he had won (almost) everything there was to win, and after a solid, if not spectacular, rookie season alongside Norris, he spent much of 2025 appearing to justify every ounce of the hype.
While Norris spoke openly about his emotions and weaknesses – something many interpreted as a very human crack in his armour – Piastri did not say much. He simply won motor races. Cold-blooded, unflappable, stripped of unnecessary theatrics.
Race winner Oscar Piastri, McLaren
Photo by: Erik Junius
But Formula 1 in 2026 has moved a long way from the version of motor racing familiar to amateur racers at indoor kart tracks, where ultimately the guy with the biggest balls wins by driving through the corners faster and cleaner than everyone else while staying out of trouble. The new Formula 1 is more like a game of chess. Having the biggest balls still matters, but intelligently juggling complex parameters such as energy deployment and extracting peak performance from the tyres has taken on overriding importance.
Or, to put it another way: there was a time when being the fastest man at driving a racing car could make you world champion. In a field whose overall standard is probably higher than ever before, that alone is no longer remotely enough.
It would make for a fascinating experiment to put the entire 2026 grid back into the 2025 cars. Would Piastri start winning again? Would Lewis Hamilton still struggle with the Ferrari? Ultimately, it is irrelevant. Formula 1 world championships are won in the real world. Parallel universes exist only on Reddit. And, for fans, it can be great fun to lose yourself in them.
There is a difference between the Piastris of this world and the Antonellis. Antonelli burst onto the scene like a bolt of lightning in his very first Formula 1 practice session at Monza. Everyone could see that this kid was something special. A natural talent, born with the right instincts.
Piastri seems more like the kind of racing driver who needs a little more time to adapt to new circumstances before he can truly flourish.
That is not to suggest that he is somehow inherently less gifted. It would not surprise me in the slightest if, in a year or two, the headlines were telling a very different story again. Hamilton has proven that the genuinely great drivers should never be written off.
Perhaps that is an example Piastri can cling to the next time all that overthinking keeps him awake at night...
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Originally published by motorsport.com —
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