Martin Brundle urges Woking team to pick Piastri, not Lando Norris: “Oscar fights differently”. Martin Brundle urges McLaren to favour Piastri over Norris to avoid losing crucial points .

Internal battle at McLaren
Can the rivalry between Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris keep Max Verstappen alive and ultimately harm McLaren’s championship bid? That’s Martin Brundle’s reasoning. The former F1 driver, now a respected commentator for Sky UK, warned the Woking team that they will soon need to make a choice and favour one of their two drivers: “McLaren’s problem could emerge soon if Max Verstappen and George Russell continue to score strong results. Mercedes also has an upgrade planned for Imola that the team seems excited about. But I’m sure everyone will improve to some extent.”

Why favour Oscar Piastri over Lando Norris
“And I have no doubt that Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris” added Brundle during The F1 Show “will take points off each other. So they must be careful not to be so focused on each other that someone else comes along and wins the championship instead, as Alain Prost did in 1986. If they wait for one of them to be mathematically out of title contention, I don’t think that will happen before October or November. So they may be forced to decide before then… It depends on how the situation evolves, but I don’t think they’ll reach that point before the summer break.”

This choice, according to the 65-year-old, should fall on Oscar Piastri: “I believe Max Verstappen knows he’s dealing with a different animal when Oscar is in his mirrors. He already saw it in Jeddah and I have no doubt—Max has said so himself—that he realises Piastri is a different beast in wheel-to-wheel combat. Norris isn’t as decisive when positioning the car on overtakes… he’ll learn and I don’t think things will stay this way all season, but right now this is the situation.”

Oscar’s meteoric rise
“Oscar,” concludes Martin Brundle, “has won four of the last six races and looks like world-championship material. I think his rate of improvement has been really impressive and he learns very quickly. Towards the end of last year we already sensed this kind of potential, but I didn’t expect it to come so fast and so emphatically. Instead, now he’s winning, winning, winning and he seems very confident. Oscar Piastri isn’t worried about anything, he’s just out there and I think his race management is a bit better than Norris’s.”