Oscar Piastri could ‘usurp’ Lando Norris at McLaren in Charles Leclerc comparison

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Now that McLaren has produced the fastest car on the 2024 Formula 1 grid, there are questions over whether Lando Norris is doing enough to achieve the best out of it.

Lando Norris is the team leader at McLaren having been there for the last six seasons, and he has held his own against world-class drivers Daniel Ricciardo and Carlos Sainz.

Teammate Oscar Piastri has shown that he is more than capable of mounting a challenge, while a self-critical Norris recently revealed that he thinks he does not ‘have what it takes’ yet to win an F1 title.

Norris heads into the final 10 races with a mathematical chance of winning the title, but has won the same amount of races as Piastri.

While he has regularly outscored and out-qualified the Australian, there is a feeling that as he develops as a better driver, Piastri could begin to outperform Norris. Journalist Craig Slater made the comparison to Charles Leclerc when speaking on the Sky Sports F1 podcast.

Craig Slater makes Charles Leclerc comparison with Oscar Piastri

When Leclerc joined Ferrari in 2019 after a year at Sauber, he replaced Kimi Raikkonen and went alongside Sebastian Vettel.

In the two years they were teammates, Vettel failed to outscore Leclerc on both occasions at the end of the season leading to Ferrari replacing him at the end of 2020.

A similar scenario could happen at McLaren if Norris fails to deliver a credible title challenge now the team has produced one of the fastest cars on the grid according to Slater.

“It’s a results business. You only have to look at Sebastian Vettel and Charles Leclerc at Ferrari, where Leclerc was able to usurp Vettel based on better performances,” said Slater.

“Even though Vettel had made maybe three times as much as Leclerc has, but its not an obvious investment for the management to get a return on that money by having Vettel get better results. Ultimately, if someone else is going to drive better they will get preference.”

Can Lando Norris challenge for titles?

The last time Norris won a title in his racing career was 2017 European Formula 3 championship. Prior to that he won titles in every stepping stone towards F1 apart from Formula 2 when he finished runner-up to George Russell in 2018.

The 2024 F1 season is the first year Norris has stood a genuine chance of challenging for a title, but so far there have been several errors from him and the team that have prevented him from winning more than one race.

READ MORE: McLaren driver Lando Norris’ life outside F1 from height and parents to celebration

Strategic errors in Canada and Silverstone cost him victories, while he finished second in both the Spanish and Hungarian Grands Prix due to mistakes starting from pole. Ralf Schumacher told Norris that he must ‘urgently’ address his race starts having also lost places at the Belgian GP.

Peter Windsor believes Norris must emulate what Nigel Mansell did to his Williams teammate Nelson Piquet in 1987, and keep as many secrets as possible from Piastri as he improves.