McLaren’s championship story has taken on the tone of a family argument, and Guenther Steiner has just picked a side.
With the constructors’ crown all but spoken for, the 2025 drivers’ title is where the jeopardy lives — and it’s living inside the same garage. Oscar Piastri heads Lando Norris by nine points as F1 snaps back from summer, ten rounds to play, and Steiner says his chips are firmly on the Australian.
“For me, it’s clearly Oscar Piastri,” he told Web.de, citing consistency, composure and a lower error rate as the separators. Norris, he added, is “strong” but guilty of those infuriating small slips that swing big titles. You don’t need to squint to see what Steiner’s talking about: Canada was his case study, when Norris tried to make a gap that wasn’t really there and Piastri got away without a puncture more by luck than design.
Steiner also flagged what he views as Piastri’s quiet superpower — Mark Webber. Having an ex-frontline racer in your ear, someone who’s been in title-deciding rooms and survived the heat next to Sebastian Vettel, isn’t nothing. Piastri listens, Steiner says, and it shows in how quickly he resets after setbacks.
That take isn’t exactly out on a limb. Nico Rosberg has talked up a “scary” edge for Piastri, Jolyon Palmer’s charted the way the Aussie has turned early soft spots into weapons, and Martin Brundle keeps noting the cool head that rarely abandons him. Norris, to his credit, hasn’t ducked the conversation. He’s admitted he can be too hard on himself at times, even if he’s insisted his openness and sensitivity aren’t costing him points.
For all that, McLaren’s house hasn’t fallen down. The team’s call for respectful racing — the now-familiar papaya policy — has kept things civil enough. But even Steiner admits that détente hangs by a thread. “It could happen at any time,” he warned of a clash, pointing to “near misses” already on the tape.
And that’s the knife edge now. Ten races, nine points, one garage. Piastri’s got the formline and the calm; Norris has the speed and a sense he’s one perfect weekend away from flipping the script. If they keep it clean, McLaren strolls to a double and we get a title fight decided on raw pace and nerve. If they don’t, one carbon-fibre tangle could decide everything.
Either way, the season’s most compelling battle isn’t red or silver. It’s papaya, and it’s personal.
