Brundle points to Monza as the moment Piastri’s title bid began to wobble
McLaren were always going to mint the 2025 world champion. The intrigue was whether the trophy would end up in papaya orange on Lando Norris’ shelf or Oscar Piastri’s. For much of the summer, it looked like the latter. Then Monza happened — and Martin Brundle thinks that’s where the balance shifted for good.
By the time F1 packed up at Zandvoort, Piastri had seven wins in his pocket — China, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Miami, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands — and a 34-point cushion over Norris after the Briton retired with an engine issue. It felt decisive. But the following race brought a flashpoint that lingered far beyond Italy’s parkland.
At Monza, Norris lost out in the stops with a slow front-left. Piastri emerged ahead. McLaren told the Australian to give the place back. He did — reluctantly — after challenging the logic on the radio. The team had already asked Norris to play the game earlier with pit priority; a messy 5.9-second stop for Lando versus a crisp 1.9 for Oscar left the order scrambled and the atmosphere… cooler.
Brundle, writing in his post-Abu Dhabi column for Sky, framed it as a straightforward call from the pit wall given the pre-agreed priorities. The team, he noted, merely “corrected” the situation on track. The subtext was clearer: if that rattled Piastri, he allowed it to.
The Australian later admitted he’d been “overdriving” in Baku. He hit the wall twice — once in qualifying, once in the race — and jumped the start for good measure. After that, his season went scratchy. Norris thumped him in Singapore. McLaren binned a likely haul with a double DNF in the Austin Sprint. Mexico and Brazil were a grind. A disqualification in Las Vegas stung the team. Piastri reset in Qatar and Abu Dhabi with back-to-back second places, but the momentum had long since swung. He finished the season third overall, 13 points down on the new champion, Norris.
From Zandvoort to Abu Dhabi, Norris outscored his teammate 148–101. For Brundle, there were two ingredients in that late run: Piastri still searching for his ceiling on low-grip surfaces, and Max Verstappen/Red Bull rediscovering some heavyweight form, nicking six of the final nine.
If you watched the head-to-heads closely this year, you didn’t need telemetry to spot the styles at play. Piastri’s calling card remains that ice-cold, inch-perfect aggression in combat; Norris’ edge came from a shrewder read of long-run pace and tire life when it mattered. On Sundays through the back half of the year, that balance hurt Oscar more often than not.
Did Monza actually break anything inside McLaren? Unlikely. The team had a plan, it unravelled in the messiness of a slow stop, and they tidied it up. But drivers are human, and timing matters. In a fight as tight as Norris vs. Piastri, with the title within touching distance, any wobble gets magnified. Radio barbs and a public hand-back in front of the Tifosi don’t simply evaporate by the next Thursday press conference.
What’s more interesting is what came after. Piastri’s Bahrain–Zandvoort stretch was the most devastating run of his F1 career, a clear statement that he can string weekends together with ruthless efficiency. The version that showed up post-Monza looked hurried. Errors crept in. Strategy calls didn’t smile on him. Confidence, the invisible currency of title fights, trickled the other way.
None of this diminishes Norris’ campaign. He steadied his own rocky middle phase, racked up podiums when they were on, hammered home the points in the final swing, and kept the temperature down when teammates’ tensions could’ve bubbled. That’s how championships are won, especially inside the same garage.
The takeaway for McLaren? They’ve got the grid’s sharpest driver pairing and a car that’s been quick across most configurations. They also have the thing every title-winning outfit eventually confronts: managing two alpha-level operators, week after week, while making clean, consistent calls under pressure. Monza won’t be the last time they’re tested there.
For Piastri, the homework is obvious and solvable. Make low-grip days less streaky. Turn the radio static down when a call stings. Keep the overtakes bold, but keep the weekends tidy. He’s already shown he can be the most complete driver on the grid over a run of races. Do that from March to November and there won’t be anything for Brundle — or the rest of us — to wonder about next time.
