It said a lot about how well Oscar Piastri performed in his second full season as a Formula 1 driver that he got in the way of his team mate’s championship bid at times, and even handed him a victory once. But there were also several occasions when the more experienced Lando Norris showed he could take the McLaren to levels his younger team mate couldn’t reach.
Unfortunately Piastri’s breakthrough victory in Hungary will forever be remembered for Norris spending the final stint agonising over whether to relinquish the lead to his team mate, having gained it through a quirk of McLaren’s pit stop timing. It shouldn’t be overlooked that Piastri had already come close to winning more than once already by this point in the season.
At Imola, a penalty incurred by his team kept him off the front row. He was unlucky to cop another penalty for a track limits infringement in Austria (a clear case of the stewards ignoring a recent precedent) and a tactical error by McLaren took him out of victory contention in Silverstone.
Piastri followed up his first win with a run of strong drives as he hit a mid-season purple patch in form. He out-drove Norris for second place at Spa, lost a potential win at Monza due to a strategy call and claimed a brilliant second win at Baku by passing Charles Leclerc.
Oscar Piastri
| Best | Worst | |
|---|---|---|
| GP start | 2 (x5) | 17 |
| GP finish | 1 (x2) | 13 |
| Points | 292 | |
Those weren’t the only times he beat Norris. But there were several weekends when he lagged well behind, and it wasn’t only the occasions when the team’s senior driver got his hands on their upgrades first.
Piastri couldn’t match Norris’s pace in Shanghai, Catalunya, Zandvoort and Singapore. He produced some mixed weekends: at Interlagos he handed victory in the sprint race to Norris, but didn’t figure in the rain-hit grand prix.
Taken as a whole, Piastri’s season was consistently strong, included a handful of excellent drives and no major errors. Although the qualifying gap between him and Norris actually widened in his second year, there’s still plenty of reasons to believe Piastri is a potential champion of the future.
RaceFans’ driver rankings are based partly on the scores awarded to drivers for their performances in each round as well as other factors.
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