How Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris avoided ‘nasty’ turn in F1 title fight

Oscar Piastri has explained how his relationship with Lando Norris actually improved as the pair battled for the 2025 Formula 1 driver’s title, despite the risk of things turning ‘nasty’.

When team-mates fight for world championship honours, it is not uncommon for things to become fractured in the garage, or for the drivers to push beyond the limit when on the track.

However, last year’s battle between the McLaren pair maintained a cordial feel throughout, with the team ultra-focused on providing a fair and level playing field with the much-maligned papaya rules.

Asked on the High Performance Podcast how his relationship with Norris had changed across the year, Piastri said: “In all honesty, I don’t think it really changed, which I don’t think anyone really believes, or they struggle to believe. It’s very much down to how we are as people. I think we’re both quite good at separating people and what happens on the racetrack, versus off the racetrack.

“Our marketing days that we had to do together, for example, were exactly the same.

“We get asked about our relationship as team-mates quite a lot, and I think probably, it was actually better at the back end of last year than it was in the first six months that we were getting to know each other, just because we know each other more and we’ve spent so much time around one another every year.

“It really didn’t change much, because I think we both knew the situation we were in with trying to beat each other, and only one of us could win. We knew all of that, but it never got nasty.

“And I think that’s a really important thing, because it would have been very easy for last year to have got nasty, and it would have been, if it really got bad, the question of whether one of us was even sat here doing this interview wearing orange.

“But I think just the team dynamic is so important to protect going forward. Obviously, we’ve not started this year quite the way we wanted, but it would have been so easy for the battle of last year to make it look ten times worse, and ten times worse for a long time.”

Despite McLaren’s best efforts to keep things calm, there were a handful of moments where things could have taken a turn for the worse, like a collision at the Canadian Grand Prix, or when strategy calls appeared to favour one driver over the other.

“We obviously had a couple of times where we came together, but there was never – I think, in title battles, especially between team-mates that have turned sour, there has normally been some element of games or trying to hide stuff, or something like that. I think for both of us, we’re just not really like that,” he added.

“But also, we’ve seen that play out as well, and I think it doesn’t take much to get into that sequence of ‘I’m going to do this’, and then the team-mate says ‘I know you did that, so I’m going to do this’, and then it just escalates.

“For both of us, even if we did have problems, I think they were never intentional, and even if we did feel like we’d crossed a line, we were good and never had to confront each other, but we knew if we’d crossed a line ourselves, we went ‘my bad’, and the team held us accountable for that as well.

“I think we had a good system to keep things friendly.”