Montoya’s warning to Norris: stop showing your hand or keep paying the price
Lando Norris owned Zandvoort on Friday and Saturday morning, then left the Netherlands with a smoking McLaren and a 34-point hole to Oscar Piastri. The title pendulum didn’t just swing; it flew off its hinge.
Norris was the class of practice, quickest in all three sessions and nearly a quarter of a second up on Piastri in FP3. But when it mattered, Piastri nicked pole by 0.012s, controlled the race from the front, and watched as Norris’ engine let go late on. What had looked like a weekend to close the gap instead ballooned it, with nine race weekends still to run.
And that, says Juan Pablo Montoya, wasn’t just bad luck. It was avoidable.
“It’s very sad that he dominated the whole weekend and basically showed Piastri what to do,” Montoya said on the AS Colombia YouTube channel. “If you keep making the difference in practice, your teammate understands, analyses and changes. They look at your differential, your pedals… you can adapt a lot to the other driver and learn a lot. That’s what Piastri did.”
Montoya’s point is simple and brutally old-school: if you’ve got an edge, don’t broadcast it. McLaren runs an open-garage philosophy like every top team in F1 2025 — data, overlays, braking traces, the lot — and usually it’s a force multiplier. But when your teammate is as sharp as Piastri, it can also be a fast track to handing over your advantage before qualifying even starts.
“So that’s where not showing all your cards comes into play,” Montoya added. “If Lando knows he’s doing well, he shouldn’t show everything he’s got right from the start of the weekend.”
Norris doesn’t see it that way. Even with McLaren’s typically bulletproof reliability finally blinking on his side, he’s not asking for fate to even the score.
“I can still win the championship without anything happening to Oscar,” he said in Monza. “That’s the way I wish to do it.”
He did concede the obvious: life would be easier if other teams could insert a few cars between the two papaya cars on Sundays. “We’re so dominant as a team and that almost makes my life harder,” he admitted. When you’re locked into a two-car shootout, track position is king — and Zandvoort was a case study. Losing pole meant losing control, which meant chasing, which meant overheating, which eventually meant nothing but smoke.
“The only thing I can do is win every race,” Norris said, half-grin, half-grit. “That’s gonna be difficult. I’ll make sure I give it everything I can.”
He also gave Piastri his due. “I have a good teammate. He’s strong, he’s quick in every situation, every scenario,” Norris said. “Zandvoort is just a different situation. It’s just unlucky. It’s not my fault, and sometimes that’s just racing.”
The pressure is real, but the story isn’t finished. Nine weekends is a lot of tarmac — and this year’s calendar still carries a few tracks where Norris traditionally finds rhythm quickly. The complication is that Piastri’s not blinking either. He’s been relentlessly tidy, rarely leaving lap time on the table, and more importantly, turning every small opening into a result. That 0.012s pole? That’s the kind of margin championships are built on.
The Montoya critique is one angle. The other is the psychology of a title fight inside a united team. McLaren will continue to share everything; that’s how you win constructors’ titles and keep both garages pulling in the same direction. The trick for Norris is to protect the bits that can’t be downloaded — confidence under braking, a line tweak in Sector 2, the lap build in Q3 — and convert Friday swagger into Saturday execution.
There’s no appetite for gamesmanship or hoping for “one of those days” on the other side of the garage, and that’s to Norris’ credit. He wants this the hard way. The scoreboard, for now, says it’s the only way.
Next up, the reset button: new weekend, new grip levels, new weather curveballs. After Zandvoort’s gut-punch, Norris doesn’t need a miracle. He needs a clean Saturday, a clean start, and 90 minutes without a dashboard lighting up like a Christmas tree. Easy to say. Hard to deliver. Exactly how titles are won — or lost — when the only guy who can beat you is parked 10 meters away.
