Headline: “Why you picked this damn sport”: Piastri shrugs off luck talk as Zandvoort opens F1’s run-in
Oscar Piastri rolled into Zandvoort with a nine-point championship lead and very little patience for the luck narrative that’s trailed him through the first half of 2025. The McLaren driver admits there’ve been days this season that make you question the whole enterprise — “why you picked this damn sport,” as he put it — but he isn’t interested in building a title case on what-ifs.
It’s not as if those what-ifs aren’t being offered. Former F1 racer-turned-analyst Jolyon Palmer suggested Piastri’s lead could be north of 60 points had the breaks gone his way. Instead, it’s nine over the other side of the garage, where Lando Norris has been both fast and opportunistic in a year McLaren has set the rhythm more often than not.
The freshest sting for Piastri came in the final round before the break. He made the better launch, but ended up on the wrong of two McLaren strategy cards. Norris, starting P3, swept by to win. Piastri could’ve come out of Hungary growling. He didn’t.
“There’s always going to be things that don’t go the way you want — that’s part of it,” he said ahead of the Dutch Grand Prix. He added that he doesn’t feel hard done by, stressing that the camp has “done a lot of things well that we can control.” The Australian sounded like a driver intent on keeping the noise out and the margins tight. Ten races to go, keep doing what’s been working — and perhaps just a tick better.
There’s a note of steel beneath the deadpan. Piastri believes he’s driven well, learned the hard lessons, and that’s where his focus lies. Alternate universes can stay in sci‑fi. “None of that matters,” he said. “I’m just trying to focus on these next 10 races and how I can perform the same, or better, than I did at the start of the year.”
On the other side of the McLaren pit wall, Norris didn’t dodge the premise that fortune has smiled at times. He did “roll the dice,” he admitted, and sure, there’s been “a little bit of luck.” But that’s not the full picture. This has also been a season of deliberate choices, he argued — committing to McLaren for the long haul, living with a car that wasn’t immediately in his window, and knuckling down with the engineers to turn awkward into fast.
“I would not have won in Budapest if I didn’t improve on those myself and that was not luck,” Norris said. “That’s hard work.” He also pointed to the less glamorous bits of a title fight: staying clean, following the rules, keeping out of trouble. In his view, those are decisions too — and they’ve paid points.
In short, the intra-team duel at McLaren is as nuanced as it is tight. Piastri’s speed has been relentless, Norris’s racecraft razor sharp. When strategy split them before summer, it stung one and elevated the other. That’s a dynamic that’ll hover over every call from now until Abu Dhabi, because this isn’t just about car performance anymore — it’s about judgement under pressure from the cockpit to the pit wall.
Which brings us to Zandvoort. The high-banked, narrow Dutch amphitheatre is rarely a straight read. Overtaking can be tricky, winds can be fickle and safety cars love a cameo. It’s also a circuit that rewards confidence on entry and commitment through the long arcs — a place where a driver in a groove can carry a car, and a team in the window can control a race from the front.
McLaren, on recent form, will fancy both. The question is which driver gets first say on Sunday, and whether strategy will again force a split decision. Both Piastri and Norris have reason to believe the title will come down to execution on days like these — when pole isn’t guaranteed, when a gust at Tarzan can blow a lap wide, when the undercut might be potent but track position is king. That’s where fortune can look like fate, and where the best teams make their own.
For now, Piastri’s not interested in counting the unlucky breaks. He’s counting opportunities. Norris is doing the same, with his own blend of pragmatism and punch. If you’re looking for a crack in McLaren’s unity, you won’t find it this week. But tension in the margins? That’s baked into any title fight that runs two doors down from the same coffee machine.
The orange grandstands will take care of the atmosphere. The rest is up to the guys in papaya.
