On 31 August 2025, Oscar Piastri stood on the top step at Zandvoort while Lando Norris sat in the McLaren garage nursing an oil leak and, by his own admission, wanting little more than to grab a burger and go home. Piastri left the Netherlands 34 points clear of his team-mate, and the question doing the rounds in the paddock was whether the Dutch Grand Prix had just settled the championship. Twelve months on, at the same circuit, Piastri crossed the line 32 seconds behind the same team-mate.
That is the measure of one of the most complete reversals in recent Formula 1 memory. Norris is the reigning world champion, having beaten Max Verstappen to the 2025 title by two points in Abu Dhabi, and he has opened the second half of 2026 with back-to-back wins in Hungary and at Zandvoort. Piastri, meanwhile, is 55 points adrift of him and has become what Motorsport.com’s Christian Nimmervoll called McLaren’s unofficial number two.
What changed for Oscar Piastri
Nothing about the driver, plainly. Piastri has not forgotten how to race, and the raw evidence of 2025 — a season in which he was the favourite deep into the autumn — has not evaporated. What changed is the machinery beneath him.
McLaren’s MCL40 is a narrower tool than the car that swept 2025. Norris has been explicit about its shape: enormous strength in high-speed corners, a real deficit to Mercedes in the slow ones. “No one matches us in high speed,” he said at Zandvoort. “But their advantage that they have to us in slow speed is also crazy.” That profile suits a driver willing to lean on a car that moves around beneath him. Team principal Andrea Stella has praised Norris for extracting everything from low grip and hard tyres, while acknowledging in the same breath that the 2026 McLaren asks Piastri to drive against his natural instincts.
The championship maths has hardened
Norris sits fourth on 159 points, 83 behind championship leader Kimi Antonelli, whose Mercedes has carried him to the front of a title race almost nobody predicted a year ago. At this stage of 2025, Antonelli had 64 points to George Russell’s 184; the pair are now separated by a chasm running the other way, with Russell tied on points with Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton, 59 behind his own team-mate.
Within that picture, Piastri’s problem is not simply the gap to Antonelli. It is that McLaren’s own recovery narrative has quietly become a Norris narrative. When Woking talks about having a say in 2026, it is talking about one car. Even Norris is reluctant to claim more, insisting after his Dutch win that “I don’t have the car I need to fight for a championship” — a verdict that, if accurate, leaves still less room for a second McLaren challenge.
A support structure under scrutiny
The off-track picture has shifted too. Mark Webber, once seen as a decisive asset in Piastri’s route to a world title, is now described by those who cover the team as a peripheral presence in the Australian’s orbit. Reputations in this sport are built and dismantled on comparisons within a garage, and Piastri is losing his badly at exactly the moment the sport is deciding who the drivers of the new rules era are.
None of which makes the slide permanent. Piastri is 25, contracted to a team that has just found a step in performance, and the 2026 regulations are young enough that the competitive order at Zandvoort may not be the order in Singapore or Las Vegas. But a year ago the question was whether he had already won the championship. Now it is whether he is still McLaren’s first choice to try. That distance, covered in twelve months, is the story of his season.
