What if McLaren had let Norris and Piastri off the leash from Round 1?
Six races to go and the 2025 title fight has boiled down to a very modern problem for Woking: two drivers, one championship. Oscar Piastri leads the standings on 336 points; Lando Norris sits at 314. Both have 14 podiums. Piastri’s banked seven wins to Norris’ five and, crucially, he’s been ahead since Saudi. Lurking with intent is Max Verstappen on 273 after outscoring both McLarens in Italy, Azerbaijan and Singapore. If anyone knows how to crash a two‑horse race, it’s the guy chasing a fifth straight crown.
Mika Hakkinen thinks this stays in-house. “I have to say McLaren, of course,” the double world champion said at Il Festival dello Sport in Trento. “The team will certainly give the drivers orders to avoid trouble. They are both very good.” The nuance came next: “Lando has much more experience. That counts for a lot. But he also has fewer points. So I don’t know, one of the two.”
Jacques Villeneuve, reliably contrary, went the other way. Asked who takes it, he didn’t flinch: “Verstappen. And so it will be his best World Championship ever. Because the two McLaren drivers are suffering too much from the pressure. They need to wake up.” It’s blunt, but it touches a nerve. The car’s been quick enough to lock out Sundays. The execution hasn’t always matched.
There’s a bigger strategic layer here that might yet decide everything. With 2026 bringing a wholesale reboot of chassis and engine rules, most teams have already called time on major 2025 development. McLaren is one of them. Red Bull isn’t. A new floor in Italy transformed its tricky RB21 into a genuine threat again, and they’ve kept layering on small tweaks since. That’s the part that should make Piastri and Norris a little queasy.
Andrea Stella spelt it out in Singapore. “They were competitive in Monza, very competitive. And then they were competitive in Baku,” he said, noting Red Bull’s pace across wildly different downforce levels. “Here in Singapore, they might have struggled a bit in the past, and the evidence is that they might have resolved both of these high-drag and Singapore factors. But this is not a surprise. It’s Red Bull. They are extremely capable. Max is a driver who is just Max Verstappen. I don’t think we need to make any further comments, so it’s no surprise that they are in the game. It’s tight, and it’s interesting; obviously, we would like to make Formula 1 boring. We have done it sometimes, at some of the events, but normally, Formula 1 is competitive and tight. You have to accept the fight, and that’s what we are doing.”
The flip side? Laurent Mekies, now steering Red Bull on the pit wall, flagged a run of circuits with the kind of mid‑speed sequences where McLaren tends to purr — think Circuit of The Americas and Mexico City. Translation: this swings both ways. If McLaren’s package sings in that window and the drivers keep their elbows (mostly) in, the team can control its own destiny without another wind tunnel part.
And that takes us back to the original what-if. McLaren’s management of its two chargers has been cautious at times this year. Sensible? Absolutely. The car’s been too valuable to risk. But letting them race earlier might have produced a more decisive pecking order by now — fewer bruised egos, clearer team play, and possibly a bigger cushion over Verstappen before Red Bull rediscovered itself. The counterargument is obvious: without that discipline, they might have thrown away points they’ll now desperately need.
As it stands, the margins are paper-thin. Piastri’s edge comes from a season of clean, clinical Sundays and an ability to wring wins out of weekends that didn’t start that way. Norris’ case rests on experience under pressure — tyre calls, safety car chaos, the small stuff that turns second into first when the track starts to move. Hakkinen’s right: that counts in the last six.
Villeneuve’s provocation also isn’t baseless. Verstappen’s recent form combined with a car trending upwards is the one scenario McLaren really didn’t need this late. If Milton Keynes has found a broadly competitive window across low and high drag — as Stella suggests — then every McLaren misstep becomes a Red Bull invitation. The arithmetic changes fast when the guy in third starts nicking wins.
So where does this go? If McLaren keeps upgrades in the drawer, strategy and team craft become the differentiators. They’ll have to make peace with a little intra‑garage friction, allow enough racing to let the faster driver of the day get on with it, and still avoid friendly fire. It’s not romantic, but the constructors’ discipline that got them here may yet be the thing that decides which McLaren gets to lift the big one.
We’ll get our answer the hard way. Six weekends, three contenders, two cars from the same garage, one extremely motivated five‑time in waiting. If Woking wanted a boring end to 2025, they picked the wrong season to build a rocket. The rest of us? We’ve got a title fight that won’t exhale until Abu Dhabi.
