‘Reasonable’ but nowhere: Piastri puzzled as Norris nails Mexico pole, Villeneuve left scratching his head
Lando Norris stuck the landing in Mexico City with a crushing pole lap. Oscar Piastri, in the other McLaren, never quite found the same gear. The gap? Almost six tenths, a canyon between teammates on a weekend where the papaya car looked a match for anything.
Norris’ 1:15.586 wrestled pole away from Charles Leclerc by a quarter of a second, while Piastri could do no better than eighth in Q3. Carlos Sainz’s five-place grid penalty from his Austin collision with Kimi Antonelli nudges Piastri up to seventh for Sunday, but that barely softens the blow.
What made it stranger was Piastri’s mood. He didn’t sound lost. If anything, he sounded mystified.
“I feel like I’ve done some decent laps through the weekend, but everything seems to be about four or five-tenths off,” he said afterwards. “Ultimately, just a bit frustrated with how the session has gone… being that far off when you feel like you’ve done a reasonable job is a difficult place to be.”
That line raised an eyebrow from Jacques Villeneuve on Sky Sports F1 duty. The 1997 world champion called it “really strange” to hear a driver consider the car “reasonable” while trailing his teammate by that margin.
“When you’re slower than your teammate by that amount, normally you push a little harder,” Villeneuve said. “You’ll lock wheels, get in trouble, start to figure out where the issues are. But he seemed happy with how the car was feeling, and that’s what’s really strange.”
Piastri arrived in Mexico leading the Drivers’ Championship, with Norris and Max Verstappen his closest company (see the official 2025 standings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Formula_One_World_Championship). So yes, the result stings, and the optics are awkward, but Sunday still offers scope for damage limitation—if McLaren’s race pace holds and if Piastri can make the first stint count.
Easier written than done at altitude. Jamie Chadwick, also on Sky’s coverage, warned that Mexico’s thin air blunts the tow and compresses performance in a way that makes big Sunday swings harder to engineer.
“It’s not like he’s made one or two mistakes in a lap and can go, ‘Right, that’s where the time is,’” Chadwick said. “He’s been down on performance to Lando all weekend, the deficit hasn’t really changed. Track position is quite critical after Lap 1. Even though you’ve got this long, massive straight, the effect of the tow isn’t so significant. He’s going to have to get his elbows out.”
That, at least, is something Piastri didn’t shy away from. He hinted at “some fun” if he and his side of the garage unlock what’s missing—fun, in this context, likely meaning a combative first lap and some sharp elbows through the midfield if McLaren’s long-run numbers are as tidy as the car has looked in clean air.
For McLaren, the spread will invite questions. Norris’ lap was a thumping piece of execution, particularly through the chicanes in Sectors 1 and 2 where confidence on the brakes pays double at this circuit, and where small swings in tyre prep show up loud on the clock. Piastri, by his own admission, didn’t feel lost in the car. That often points to a narrow operating window being hit on one side of the garage and not the other—a familiar story in modern F1 that can look dramatic on paper while being maddeningly subtle inside the cockpit.
The good news for Piastri? Seventh isn’t a dead zone here. The 800-metre run to Turn 1 is the longest of the season and invites opportunists, even if the slipstream isn’t the silver bullet it used to be. The bad news? With the field so compact, one conservative first lap can lock you into train mode, and a rare Mexico City breeze can shuffle braking references just enough to put a move on ice.
Norris, for his part, did exactly what title contenders are supposed to do on days like this: he capitalised. If Piastri’s lead remains intact or not is going to rest on how aggressive McLaren allows him to be in the opening exchanges, whether the car can sit in traffic without cooking itself, and if the strategy team dare a divergent tyre offset to crack the stalemate that tends to form after the first stops.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, expect a driver determined not to leave Mexico with more questions than answers. Piastri’s baseline is too high, and his season too consistent, for this sort of gap to become a theme. One way or another, he’ll try to force the issue on Sunday.
Key notes:
– Norris on pole; Leclerc alongside; Piastri starts P7 after Sainz’s five-place penalty from the Austin tangle with Antonelli.
– Piastri says the laps felt “reasonable” despite being 0.588s off Norris in Q3.
– Villeneuve baffled by the tone; Chadwick warns the tow is weaker at altitude and overtaking will be hard in a converged field.
– Championship picture: Piastri leads heading into Sunday, with Norris and Verstappen in pursuit (official standings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Formula_One_World_Championship).
If it turns into elbows-out survival in the stadium, clear air might be worth more than outright pace. If it turns into chess, Piastri’s got ground to make up the old-fashioned way—one pass at a time. Either way, the lead McLaren to watch at lights out won’t be the one starting first.
