Lando Norris on his relationship with Oscar Piastri: “We’re a team where two drivers push each other”. McLaren: Lando Norris opens up on his relationship with Oscar Piastri.

Lando Norris – Oscar Piastri
In the first two races of the season, as particularly evidenced by the double podium in China, the potential of McLaren has clearly emerged, with Lando Norris’ win in Australia followed by Oscar Piastri’s victory in Shanghai. Two high-profile drivers who, at least up to this point, don’t seem to have sparked a strong rivalry or internal conflicts in their battles for victory.

Mutual help
The MCL39, as Norris reiterated at the recent Chinese GP, remains a car that is “difficult to drive,” but this has not limited the two drivers, who have instead helped each other improve their driving styles: “Apart from Ferrari, I don’t think there’s any other team where the two drivers push each other as much as we do, and that’s a huge advantage,” Lando Norris explained after the race. “Even if we all had the same car, if you have two fast drivers, that team will always beat the others. We have a great car and a great team, but the two drivers also push each other harder than anywhere else. In this way, the best driver always wins. Oscar and I drive differently, but we end up aligning our styles.” To demonstrate this, Lando Norris gave an example of how much Oscar Piastri has helped him improve a problem related to his driving style: “Oscar’s ability to adapt to understeering was impressive, and I struggled more with it. I hate understeer just as much as I hate brakes that don’t work. I learned a lot from Oscar this weekend thanks to his ability to adapt to different situations. We have a good car and two amazing drivers, and then there’s Zak (Brown).”

The return of rivalries we’ve seen before?
The world standings now see Lando Norris ahead by 10 points over Oscar Piastri, with the latter in fourth place and determined to climb the rankings starting from the next Japanese GP. Any potential comeback could generate an internal challenge, one that has been seen many times in McLaren’s history, like one of the last ones mentioned by the English driver himself, who wanted to emphasize that these types of tensions won’t occur with Oscar Piastri:

“In 2007, Lewis Hamilton with Fernando Alonso! Wait until I block him during a pit-stop (referring to what happened in qualifying at the Hungarian GP), or there’s a ‘multi-22’ scenario (the team order that Vettel ignored at Red Bull to prevail over Webber in Malaysia in 2023), or something like that. No, seriously, I think we’re ready. As much as people like to talk about those laps in Melbourne where we were told to hold position, we were free to fight all the way.”