After 15 races at the border of the championship wilderness, Lando Norris has roared back to the top of the title standings with a statement domination drive in Mexico City.
It was the most complete weekend of Norris’s career, and though he’d already had convincing victories this season, none was as meaningful as this one.
Having been criticised so many times this season for failing to put the sister car under any serious pressure, in Mexico and in the United States before that he punished the erstwhile title leader for hitting poor form at the wrong part of the season.
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In a long-running and error-prone arm-wrestle with teammate Piastri, he’s finally nosed ahead of the usually steadfast Australian to lead the standings by a single point heading into the final four rounds of the campaign.
Regardless of whether this momentum carries him to the title or not, his comeback is significant, having twice recovered from considerable deficits that might have defeated lesser drivers.
His self-inflicted crash in Canada left him 22 points behind Piastri, a margin made only more damning by the fact he started the year with a 23-point head start after his teammate spun off the road in Australia. The swing was more damaging than the margin.
After clawing his way back into contention by the mid-season break, a power unit failure in the Netherlands then dropped him to what appeared to be a devastating 34 points down.
But it’s taken him just five rounds to reverse the deficit in a display of championship grit.
Some of that he owes to Piastri.
PIT TALK PODCAST: Oscar Piastri has lost the title lead for the first time in 15 rounds after a recovery drive from seventh to fifth wasn’t enough to counter a dominant victory by teammate Lando Norris. Where has it gone wrong for the Aussie, and can he fight back from here?
PIASTRI PILES ON THE PRESSURE
Norris was the pre-season championship favourite. With four more years of F1 experience, he was the natural leader, even if Piastri was tipped to nudge him along.
But it took his junior teammate just five rounds to take the title lead this year, and though his advantage waxed and waned through the European campaign, there were no obvious cracks in his game.
Norris, meanwhile, floundered. Qualifying was his strength in 2024, sweeping Piastri 20-4 over a single lap. In 2025, however, pressure errors gave his teammate a clear run through qualifying that he mercilessly converted to points swings.
Though he wouldn’t admit it at the time, his confidence took a beating.
“At times at the beginning of the year I certainly did [doubt myself],” he told Sky Sports. “I never want to blame my car, and certainly when the car was winning and Oscar was winning, the last thing I ever could do is use the excuse that my car is not good enough.
“I wasn’t getting up to grips and wasn’t finding a way to make it work.”
One of Piastri’s career strengths is his ability to absorb information. Part of that is being able to see what Norris has done better than him in a session and then adapt that to his own driving. It’s why we’ve often seen him close big gaps in practice to match or beat his teammate in qualifying, sometimes after just hours out of the car.
The irony for Norris was that in the middle of the year Piastri was executing elements of his driving style better than he was.
“I don’t feel like I should ever have a reason to have an excuse,” he said. “There’s reasoning for things — why I struggle here, why I’ve struggled there and so forth — but it’s not an excuse.
“If I’m slow, I’ll say I’ve just done a bad job and I wasn’t a good enough driver on that day. I think I’ve always been open about those things.
“There are clearly things which work for me and things that don’t. I hate that because I hate to have a reason for why sometimes I struggle. I just want to be able to drive whatever car I get given.”
Chaotic Mexico GP race recep | 09:18
‘THE LESS I KNOW, THE BETTER’
Two key things happened in the first part of the season that appear to have materially boosted Norris’s title hopes.
Digging deep to iron out the inconsistencies that were leaving the door open to Piastri to score against him, in Monaco he began taking a different approach to qualifying.
Rather than having a reference time appear on his steering wheel during his qualifying lap — and telling him whether he was gaining or losing time relative to that lap — he began leaving his steering wheel blank.
It eliminated instances of him attempting to overdrive the car when he could see he was shipping time to pole position.
He switched off the reference time in Monaco and immediately snapped a six-race pole drought.
“The thing when I don’t have it is I push no matter what — no matter how the start of the lap was, no matter how any corner was,” he explained. “I guess it’s because you have no reference of maybe the overall lap time; you just always try and maximise every corner, otherwise sometimes I just stare at it too much, and that’s never the best thing.
“I just pushed the braking in a few little places a bit more, took a couple of bits more risk in the high speed. Quite often the laps I do best, I don’t really know what’s happened or how it’s happened.
“Like I said on the radio to Will [Joseph, race engineer] and Jarv [Andrew Jarvis, performance engineer], the less I know, the better I do normally on my quali laps.”
The second element came in Canada, where McLaren brought tweaked front suspension geometry aimed at giving the drivers more front-end feeling.
It’s something both Norris and Piastri had noted as being a step backwards relative to the previous year’s car, but whereas the Australian adapted to it, the Briton struggled with the numbness when pushing in qualifying. It was integral to what had become a messy one-lap record for the year up to that point.
Norris took the new suspension. Piastri, noting that it wasn’t a performance upgrade and only changed his feeling in the car, has opted not to use it.
While Norris had another error-prone qualifying in Canada, he hasn’t made a major qualifying mistake since then.
Canada, conveniently enough, was round 10 of the season, representing exactly half of the races to date.
The average qualifying margin between the drivers before and since then paints a clear picture.
Qualifying averages
Rounds 1 to 10: Piastri faster by 0.144 seconds
Rounds 11 to 20: Norris faster by 0.171 seconds
There is more context to these numbers — see below — and while they haven’t made Norris unbeatable in qualifying, it’s helped him access the car’s top performance range more easily.
“I’m finding a better way to make it work now. It’s as simple as that,” he told Sky Sports.
“One race performing well I don’t think means anything. Two, three, four in a row does.
“I think the last few months have been good.”
‘Obvious’ Oscar admits to driving change | 02:42
NORRIS IS STILL GETTING BETTER
It’s not enough to say Norris has simply turned it all around in the three-race run spanning Monaco to Canada.
The above averages are indicative but leave out key information.
Piastri, for example, on average was the faster qualifier all the way to the mid-season break, and he’s outqualified Norris twice since the sport resumed.
Both of them were at what have been Norris tracks: the Netherlands and Singapore, where the Briton belted the Australian last year.
At the time they looked like important results in the context of Piastri’s title momentum, even if he was slowly allowing points to flow away from him.
They were also closely matched in Italy and Azerbaijan, even if he was a barrier magnet at the latter.
It was really only in Austin and Mexico City that Norris was able to stretch his legs over the Australian.
He’s always been the better performer at these circuits, but it was his qualifying defeat in Singapore — coming off his roundly criticised performance in Azerbaijan, where he failed punish Piastri for his dual crashes — that contributed to him building to his current formidable level.
“In Singapore … I almost felt like it was the beginning of the season again — no feeling for the front, no confidence, no ability to go out and do what I did today [in Mexico],” he said.
He expanded to Sky Sports: “We had our debrief and we sat down for half an hour, and like: ‘Guys, this is exactly the car I don’t want. This is the reason why we can’t win more races. Why we’re not going to win in the future is if we keep having a car that doesn’t give me what I need.’
“This weekend [in Mexico] I just had a little bit more what I need, and I can perform how I did this weekend. It’s as simple as that.”
It’s put Norris in top shape for the final run-in.
“It’s hard to quantify how much the work the team has done behind the scenes to give me a bit more of what I want and what I need in order to perform at the level that I can perform at,” he said.
“But there’s certainly a lot of work that I’ve also done personally, away from the track, with my team, with a lot of people to understand what my struggles were, reasoning, all those things, and then how I can combat it, because the last thing I want is to make the excuse.
“Certainly progress has been made, and I’m very happy that the team has worked hard to improve on those things. But we still need to make more if I want to be even better.”
Yuki calls out 12 second pit stop | 02:17
PEAKING AT THE RIGHT TIME
If Piastri’s pressure helped spur Norris to another level of performance, the Australian is helping Norris further by falling flat at exactly the wrong time of the year.
It’s not just that we’re deep into the final quarter of the season; it’s also that the sport is more competitive that it has been all year.
Before the mid-season break, half of all Q3 sessions saw the top 10 drivers spread over more than a second.
Since the mid-season break only one Q3 session — the crash- and rain-affected qualifying in Azerbaijan — has seen such a large spread between the top 10 qualifiers.
Whereas Norris was more easily able to recover from his errors in the first half of the season, when McLaren was in a dominant position, in the second part of the season Piastri is facing a stiffer contest to rebuild from his recent patchy results.
Let’s look at the biggest qualifying gaps between the teammates this season — in Piastri’s favour before the break and in Norris’s favour afterwards.
Deficit between 0.2 and 0.3 seconds
Before the break: Norris was beaten by this reasonable margin twice, qualifying second in Barcelona and fourth in Imola. Piastri took pole at both. Norris finished both races second, once directly ahead of Piastri and once directly behind him. Piastri outscored him by four points in total.
After the break: In Austin Piastri was less than 0.3 seconds slower than Norris but qualified sixth, four places behind his front-row-starting teammate. He finished three places behind Norris, costing him eight points.
Deficit of more than 0.4 seconds
Before the break: Norris was twice outqualified by this decisive margin, in Bahrain and Canada, sixth at the latter and seventh at the former. Piastri was on pole in Bahrain and third in Canada. Norris finished third in Bahrain behind winner Piastri. He would have finished fifth at worse, directly behind his teammate, in Canada had he not crashed out on the final laps. Piastri outscored him by 22 points — though it would have been only 12 points without the crash.
After the break: In Mexico Piastri qualified 0.588 seconds slower than Norris but was eighth in the order, seven places behind Norris. The Australian finished fifth on a day Norris dominated the race. Norris outscored him by 15 points.
Wins are worth the same points no matter when you claim them, but it’s clear that poor performances are more costly later in this season.
If you win championships on your bad days, Piastri has picked the wrong time to have his.
Much has been written about why Piastri found the last two rounds so difficult. While Norris’s wins are part of a trajectory, Piastri’s defeats are likely to be anomalous, even if they’ve materially affected his championship hopes.
But that’s not to say he’ll have things all his own way again from next weekend’s race in Brazil.
Norris’s gains are real. The qualifying gap between them since the mid-season break — Austin and Mexico blowouts excluded — is just 0.033 seconds in Piastri’s favour. Norris is just one point ahead in the standings. Both numbers are negligible.
In this final four-round showdown, with the driver split by similarly nothing, we seem set for what we all expected at the beginning of the year: an even fight between two evenly matched drivers.
With Max Verstappen threatening from 36 points off the lead, it sets us up for a thrilling conclusion.