Why McLaren won’t prioritise Oscar Piastri ‘now’ over Lando Norris amid Max Verstappen threat

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McLaren have a decision to make about Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris for the rest of the 2025 Formula 1 season.

Oscar Piastri currently leads the drivers’ championship over his McLaren teammate, Lando Norris.

That lead was cut to 25 points after the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, after the Australian made a string of uncharacteristic errors.

Norris failed to properly capitalise, only finishing seventh after the 24-year-old found the barriers in both qualifying and Sunday’s Grand Prix.

Red Bull driver Max Verstappen was the beneficiary of McLaren’s struggles and, for the first time this season, won back-to-back races.

Helmut Marko believes Verstappen is making McLaren nervous, and while he’s still 69 points behind Piastri, it appears as though Red Bull have turned a corner with their car.

McLaren are about to win the constructors’ championship, but alarm bells will be starting to ring that the relentless Verstappen could be about to mount an incredible comeback.

If team principal Andrea Stella is truly worried about the threat of the four-time world champion, it would make sense to begin prioritising Piastri, but journalists Ben Anderson and Edd Straw have explained why McLaren aren’t resorting to that course of action yet.

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Oscar Piastri won’t be prioritised over Lando Norris as the ‘gap’s not big enough’ in the championship

Anderson was talking to Straw about McLaren’s predicament on The Race F1 Podcast and explained: “I don’t think they’re totally wedded to Norris and Piastri. They’re saying, yeah, we like this pairing and it’s working really well.

“And look at how we’re dominating the constructors’ championship. But if they start to turn on each other or put the team second and themselves first and cause us problems, we’ll get rid of one of them.”

Straw replied: “But I think they do want to win the drivers’ championship.

“The reason they’re not going to prioritise Piastri now is the gap’s not big enough

“You can’t with seven races and 199 points remaining when someone’s 25 points behind, say, right, you’re the second driver now. That’s not how it works.

“Now, if Norris has another engine failure and Piastri’s 50 points up, then they might start to think, okay, maybe we will.”

Anderson: “If he gets properly in the game, which maybe they don’t really think he is at the moment, but they think he might be, then obviously they’ll have to do what Ferrari used to do and pick a point in the championship where it’s like, right, you happen to be ahead, you happen to be behind, tough luck, you’ve now got to support.

“That’s as far as they’ll go, I think.”

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Andrea Stella’s ‘weird’ Azerbaijan Grand Prix comment after botched Lando Norris pit stop

Although Piastri’s race in Baku was over before the end of the first lap, McLaren could still have won the constructors’ championship through Norris.

If Norris had outscored Ferrari by nine points, which was made easier by their struggles in Azerbaijan, then back-to-back titles would have been all but assured.

However, the British driver struggled to make any progress through the pack, with Yuki Tsunoda and Liam Lawson frustrating him during the final laps of the race.

Norris suffered a really slow pit stop, which prevented him from leapfrogging the Red Bull-backed pair, and Guenther Steiner called Stella’s comments on the stop ‘weird’.

It was the second race in succession that Norris had to deal with a malfunction during his pit stop, which cost him the opportunity to take a far bigger dent in Piastri’s lead.

He will need to convince McLaren that he can still win the title in the coming races; otherwise, the threat of Verstappen might force Norris to play the number two role.