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Lando Norris's battles with Max Verstappen have become the defining narrative of the second quarter of the Formula 1 season, but the McLaren driver faces a tougher rivalry in which he must prevail. That's the intra-team fight with Oscar Piastri.
It’s not that Piastri is a tougher opponent in absolute terms than Verstappen, who is the pre-eminent driver of F1 today and is already firmly established as an all-time great.
Piastri is instead the enemy within for Norris at McLaren. To be able to consistently do battle with Verstappen and the rest at the front, he must ensure he remains the team’s leader. That’s the reality of any team-mate relationship in F1, one both Norris and Piastri will be keenly aware of.
Piastri’s victory at the Hungaroring and stronger race than Norris’s in the Belgian Grand Prix prior to the break means talk of the Australian being on top has been prevalent. It’s premature to argue this constitutes a decisive swing in his favour, but it’s illustrative of a pair of drivers grappling to cement themselves as the focal point.
PERFORMANCE IN 2024
By every meaningful metric, Norris has been the stronger McLaren driver in 2024. In dry qualifying sessions where a meaningful comparison can be made, the scoreline is 9-3 in Norris’s favour with an average advantage of around 0.11s.
In races where both have finished, Norris is 9-5 up and has run ahead of Piastri on the road on 71.4% of laps completed. He’s also ahead on points, 199 to 167, while using the more subjective metric of The Race’s driver rankings Norris has been placed higher than Piastri 8-6.
There are two other factors we must consider. Firstly, Piastri is only in his second season in F1 and therefore is far earlier in his progression as an F1 driver. With testing opportunities strictly limited there is a significant advantage to Norris being in his sixth campaign.
However, the advantage of experience will gradually fade. You can therefore look to Piastri’s peaks as an effective measure and there have been times where his edge over Norris has been hidden, for example by the grid penalty for impeding Kevin Magnussen at Imola or the timing of the safety car in Miami having run second.
Secondly, there's the question of whether there’s a trend in Piastri's favour. You could argue there’s a gentle one, although it's inconclusive. He outperformed Norris in Hungary, outraced him at Spa and at times was the faster McLaren driver in the damp conditions at Silverstone before the team's decision not to double-stack at the first round of pitstops cost him a shot at victory.
But you have to go back to the eighth race of the season at Monaco prior to that to find a weekend on which Piastri was unquestionably the stronger McLaren driver. However, when he isn't he is usually close and it's only really in China and Spain where he’s struggled.
With the constructors’ championship a realistic goal but the drivers’ championship surely out of reach across the final 10 grands prix, the battle for supremacy at McLaren will be a fascinating sub-plot. Hungary, where Norris appeared to be battling his conscience about heeding team orders having been promoted to the lead by an irregular pitstop sequence, hints that he knows what is at stake.
But saying all that, there’s no question Norris has been the stronger McLaren driver overall so far this season.
WHERE PIASTRI NEEDS TO IMPROVE
Piastri's peaks have been impressive right from the start of his time in F1. In particular, he excelled in fast corners early on and even in the early days often it was only time loss in one corner on a qualifying lap that made the difference.
However, there is still room for improvement in single-lap pace as his record against Norris proves. At times, he has been outstanding, but as you’d expect for a second-year driver there's still detailed work to sharpen up on. For example, in Japan, he struggled to maximise the grip of the tyres for a qualifying lap.
That connects to the other obvious area for improvement which is tyre management. Piastri has taken a step this year and it would be exaggerating his situation unfairly to suggest he’s in any way bad at it. It’s also important to note that Norris is very accomplished when it comes to tyre management, at times modifying his style to do so, which means it’s inevitable that Piastri’s experience deficit means he’s still on a steep part of the learning curve.
"It's tough," he said when asked by The Race about his improvement in this area. "I feel like even if you're in your 10th season with these tyres you're still going to be learning little things here and there given how difficult they are.
"It depends on the track as well. Some tracks you're depending much more on the rear tyres, some tracks you're depending more on the front tyres, sometimes you're graining them a lot; sometimes they're overheating. So there's never really the same thing that is causing the issue week in week out. That's what makes it difficult to make progress quickly.
"It's not so much that one specific thing in terms of bringing the tyre in. sometimes it seems to matter a lot, sometimes it makes no difference. It's just working out when it is going to make a difference and when it's not is the big key. Definitely a lot of people in the past have used black magic with trying to work out these tyres."
Inevitably, this will continue to improve as Piastri's databank builds. While he jokes about 'black magic' there's no substitute for experience when it comes to getting on top of the at-times capricious and always-sensitive Pirelli tyres.
For the most part, it's now about making a small percentage improvement in all areas to get to, or even surpass, Norris's level. You can never be sure exactly where a driver will plateau, but it's abundantly clear that Piastri is seriously quick.
Sharpening his skills at the front will ensure that he's exposed to the highest-possible standards. And it's fair to say that his ice-cool demeanour and almost robotically-calm temperament is a valuable weapon for him.
WHERE NORRIS IS VULNERABLE
Temperament is the obvious area where Norris might have a baked-in disadvantage. We still need more data and it's important to remember he's still relatively early in his time running consistently at the front in F1. He's hard on himself, but that in itself isn't necessarily a problem.
The key question is whether he has the capability to convert that successfully into improvements to find those final fractions that make the difference.
"It's marginal things [that] just require little adjustments here and there," said team principal Andrea Stella after the Belgian GP.
"Certainly we work with Lando - like we work with Oscar - to try and see all the opportunities in which we can improve individually and also collaborate better to be more prepared or to use better our abilities and talents. It doesn't necessarily change our attitude, but definitely gives us some elements to analyse as to how some of these missed opportunities manifest themselves.
"For Lando it looks like statistically some opportunities that tend to happen in the early stages of the race, so we need to check if this is the early stages of the race for a reason or is just random. Lando with the support of the team will have to think, 'What can I do better to make sure we capitalise on the good work we are doing?' He was in a good starting position [at Spa], but then once we lost the position at the start with the low-deg and [problems] overtaking we made our life difficult."
This makes the second half of the season particularly important for Norris. He's teetering on the brink of proving himself to be a driver absolutely capable of winning world championships, but has to show that ruthless ability to take every chance given to him. He's close, but the majority of drivers no matter how great go through such a period where it's about rounding off the rough edges. Some do so, others remain hit-and-miss.
HOW THE BATTLE WILL PLAY OUT
Right now, Norris is the stronger all-round McLaren driver. But Piastri is inching closer and there are weekends where he's been the outright stronger McLaren driver - Saudi Arabia, Miami (where he had a spec disadvantage), Monaco and in particular the Hungaroring stand out. It's a question of whether he can repeat that consistently across a wide range of conditions and track challenges.
His skillset has steadily broadened and he's shown no signs of plateauing and he will know how important it is to use the second half of this season to accelerate as rapidly as he can across his learning curve. After all, there's every chance there could be a drivers' championship up for grabs at McLaren next year. This year isn't impossible, but is so desperately unlikely right now that it can be discounted.
That will also raise the question about which driver will be favoured. The notion of a team leader is a real one, but the idea it's preordained is nonsensical. It will depend on performance and consistency and right now it's possible to imagine either Norris or Piastri having the edge next season. Equally, they might yet prove to be so evenly matched that it swings back and forth. That could create the biggest headache for the team.
The recent debates about which driver is favoured are irrelevant when it comes to what will actually decide it. If, and it looks likely to come, there is a point where McLaren is in the hunt for the drivers' championship then the team will either have to accept that both are in contention, or favour whoever is doing better.
But despite all the frenzied arguments going on among fandom about which driver is favoured, Stella has made it abundantly clear both in terms of words and actions that he doesn't care. He has one focus, which is favouring McLaren as a team.
And that's the key question as this battle evolves. The drivers will be given leeway to do battle provided they stick with the programme. But as what appeared to be a crisis of conscience for Norris in Hungary - one that the right decision prevailed in - suggested, there's always the potential for one driver or the other to make their own objectives the top priority.
Whatever happens, the ongoing battle between the duo that could yet go either way is set to be a key F1 storyline over the next 18 months. That's why it's the first battle Norris has to win, as if he can't prevail in that one then he will not be McLaren's long-term spearhead in the wider battle against Verstappen and the rest.
