How Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris have avoided bad blood in F1 2025 title rivalry

Oscar Piastri has shared how he believes his relationship with Lando Norris has changed during their title rivalry as McLaren teammates in F1 2025.

Aside from a lurking Max Verstappen, the two McLaren teammates have controlled this year’s Drivers’ Championship and, barring an astonishing turn of events, the title will go to one of the pair.

Oscar Piastri: My relationship with Lando Norris is ‘better than ever’

While an intra-team battle for the championship usually ends in tension, if not outright hostility, the rivalry between Norris and Piastri has been without many flashpoints.

Unlike the warring Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg 10 years ago, or the infamous feud between Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna over 30 years ago, Norris and Piastri’s quest for a maiden title has been free of drama despite the additional context of both being young drivers chasing their first individual glory in F1.

This has largely been down to both drivers being kept in check by McLaren, with the Woking-based squad taking steps to ensure fairness and equality throughout the season, and quickly reacting to cool tensions via clear communication behind closed doors when things go wrong, such as when Norris collided with Piastri in Canada.

Added to that are amenable personalities, with both Norris and Piastri showing a clear willingness to listen to their team and work together, something that has made McLaren’s task easier.

Furthermore, both drivers have had ebbs and flows in their respective form, with Piastri starting the season better and Norris showing an upward trend as the season comes to a close. Momentum is firmly with the British driver with three rounds to go, and, despite his dream first title slipping through his fingers, Piastri says his relationship with Norris is perhaps even better now than it was at the start of the year.

“I think it’s either exactly the same or, honestly, probably better than it has been,” he told the Beyond the Grid podcast.

“It’s better, if anything, because we just know each other more now we’ve been together for our third year as teammates, so we just slowly got to know each other more and more.

“From that side, it’s probably in a better place than it ever has been. I think we’re both the kind of people that, what happens on track, stays on track.

“Maybe there are short-lived emotions off the track, but I think we’re both quite good at just letting things die down and again, leaving things on the track.

“So, from that side of things, that’s really not changed. The way we’re still trying to get the most out of the team is exactly the same. We still want broadly similar things from the team, I think.

“And, from the car, I think we probably have subtle differences that we’ve probably worked out more and more, what each of us likes from a car setup direction, and what our strengths and weaknesses are, but the broad messaging that we want from the team is the same still. So from that side of things, it’s all very similar to how it was two years ago.”

Most of that amenability, Piastri explained, is due to the fact that, even before McLaren returned to winning ways, the squad has been consistent in its operations and dealings to handle the dynamic between its two young hotshots.

While Norris has been with the team longer, arriving in F1 with McLaren in 2019, some four years before Piastri’s arrival, the Australian said he has zero complaints about how he and Norris have been treated during a long campaign as rivals and teammates.

“I don’t think it’s that difficult, really. It is the way we’ve always operated,” he said, when asked if McLaren’s job of managing the relationship has been further complicated by the championship dynamic.

“When that’s your default, ultimately, you need to do something different to kind of not treat each other equally, which is probably more difficult in some ways.

“So I think, it’s obviously difficult when you’re racing your teammate, and, obviously, things have happened this year. We’ve come together a couple of times.

“Obviously, those kinds of situations for a team, it is very difficult to keep everyone happy, because there is ultimately going to be at least one person who’s not good, who isn’t going to be happy, no matter how you tackle the scenario, it’s impossible.

“So I think the team has done a very good job on the whole of trying to be as fair as possible, as equal as possible, and, in terms of the equipment we’ve had this year, it’s been identical.

“The team has done as good a job as they can of trying to be fair and trying to treat each other equally. We’ve been free to race for the year, which is nice for us to have it in our own hands as much as we can. And I think nice for everyone watching as well.”

Lando Norris v Oscar Piastri: McLaren 2025 head-to-head scores

👉 F1 2025: Head-to-head qualifying statistics between team-mates

👉 F1 2025: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates

One unhappy moment for Piastri this year came at Silverstone when he lost a likely victory to Lando Norris as a consequence of a time penalty. This was given for a moment in which he was found to have braked excessively behind the Safety Car, leading to Max Verstappen briefly passing him in avoidance.

While McLaren agreed with its driver that the penalty had been harsh, there was no move to swap Norris and Piastri back around for position and give the Australian back his lost position, and he admitted that that day had stung.

“That one definitely hurt for a little bit,” he said.

“But I think, by the time we got to the next race, I had moved on from it. Obviously, when you look back at anything, there’s still going to be some residual emotion there, whether it happened 10 years ago or two weeks ago.

“I think it very much depends on how you deal with it. If you just let it take control of you, or you don’t do anything to address it… like Silverstone, for example, if I had just sat there going, ‘I think that was a crap decision. I don’t agree with it, that’s stupid’, and just sat on that, then probably it would still hurt a lot to this day.

“But when you look back at it and go, ‘Yeah, okay, maybe still don’t agree with the decision’.

“But there’s this I could have done differently. There’s this that could have happened a bit differently, and also just dealing with the emotion of like… is being upset with this going to help me? Is it going to fuel me for the next race, or is it just going to keep pissing me off? Identifying which of those two things it’s going to do and then doing something about it, that’s a really important thing for me.

“I think generally, in the times when you sit on things and bottle it up, bottle it up to an extent, that’s when the emotions can be a bit overwhelming.”

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