Lando Norris was the sport’s favourite to win the F1 title and there’s nothing you can do about it
Those claiming Oscar Piastri was dudded have been screaming for months about McLaren’s injustice. But there was far more behind the 2025 championship.
OPINION
This one’s going to open a can of worms.
I don’t know about you, but the 2025 F1 world drivers’ championship stinks worse than a beer-soaked Christmas plate left out overnight.
Anybody with an ounce of sense already knows that F1 is a money-first entertainment spectacle, with the “sport” itself being whittled away over the years as sponsorship cash and exterior corporate interests grew.
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While it has always been flooded with pay-to-play nepo babies and ritzy sponsors with buckets of influence, the open secret of the world’s premier motorsport series has become too grotesque to ignore.
Is it even about being the best anymore?
Lando Norris is clearly a stellar driver who belongs on the grid, but there are several out there who struggle to place him near the current top five for talent.
He became known as the supreme bottler over the years for crumbling under pressure after taking pole, and then repeatedly playing up the endearing “woe is me” narrative after flopping.
Throwing all that aside, he has a few very important things going for him in F1’s TikTok era. He’s active on social media, and he’s British.
Those are two very, very powerful assets for an athlete in an England-based team, broadcast by an English company, in a sport that has apparently become more interested in its drivers’ marketability than their hustle on track.
The Norris fandom had clearly permeated the upper echelons of the sport’s media. Commentary icons Martin Brundle and David Croft couldn’t hide their favouritism when Norris pulled a technically illegal overtake on Yuki Tsunoda after the Red Bull driver moved under braking on the straight.
You could feel their anger through the TV as they somewhat ominously implored the stewards to “make the right call”, even though Norris was in breach of the rules for leaving the track to gain a place. At Mexico 2024, Verstappen copped a 10-second time penalty for a similar infringement.
It might seem nit-picky, but this is the sport that smugly disqualifies drivers over a millimetre of extra flooring.
In this case, Norris got off scot-free even with all four wheels leaving the track.
The Norris crowd was thrown a bone and it was clear who the F1 industrial complex wanted to win.
A bit later in the race, Crofty interestingly declared “nothing we say in the commentary box affects what happens on track”.
It could be put down to commentators merely wanting a different champion after a four-year Max-a-thon, and I could be just another jilted Aussie shaking his fist at the Poms.
But I know many will agree that this year felt a little different.
Piastri’s too chill
So what about Oscar Piastri? His relentless reliability and cool head made him Norris’ worst nightmare the moment he started putting pressure on in qualifying two years ago.
He’s a bloke who appears to have gamed the system in terms of dealing with the media.
He rarely hits the tabloid headlines, because he understands outbursts will just be misconstrued under the global spotlight.
Under Mark Webber’s mentorship, it appears that Piastri is avoiding anything and everything that could distract from what he does on track.
Former champions saw a future WDC in him the second he clinched the F3 and F2 titles in successive years. He’s even been compared to Michael Schumacher for his ability to shut out the noise and calmly attack each problem.
Each drivers’ champion throughout history has been set apart by their ability to compartmentalise and Piastri has demonstrated time and time again over the radio how very little fazes him, even while hurtling through corners at 300km/h.
For Norris, it took until his team had the fastest car on the grid before the same could universally be said about his championship hopes.
But for F1’s new wave of Netflix fans, Piastri’s laid-back and sometimes monotone personality just won’t do. Not if he wants every advantage that can be capitalised on in the sport now symbolically run by a streaming service.
There ain’t no juicy narrative arc in the quiet achiever.
If only Piastri live streamed himself dancing with flavour-of-the-month celebrities or talked about his feelings more. He might have been champion today.
And that brings us to the elephant in the room.
Were McLaren favouring Lando?
Of course they were. He’s been with the team much longer and in their eyes, the toil they have been through naturally means some inside the setup would believe Lando “deserves” the team’s first WDC since 2008.
Meanwhile, CEO Zak Brown has been running around like a headless chook all year trying to PR-manage his own disaster. He refused to say his team had an out-and-out No. 1 driver, despite famously claiming we were “now in the Norris era”.
This masthead has covered in detail the many times McLaren has team-ordered Oscar out of a position to favour Lando. Sometimes even when the Aussie was leading the championship.
To simplify it all, those three points Piastri was forced to give Norris at Monza are what got Norris over the line last night against Verstappen.
But even as the favouritism chatter dominated F1 circles, Brown fronted the media with an unconvincing grin and earned himself an army of detractors who were getting fed up with the equality lie.
The problem is that when Piastri bolted out of the gates at the beginning of the season, the McLaren garage refused to accept they had maybe hired someone who is better than their long-term prospect.
The grand papaya plan had an Aussie-shaped hole in it.
Even as he held onto a 34-point WDC lead, it was clear there was nothing Piastri could do to convince his team he was the one to back.
Did Norris outperform his rivals?
For the most part, championships this century have been won by the best driver of the year, oftentimes by one viewed as one of the all-time greats.
Unfortunately, they have always been helped along by cars that drastically outperform the field, but rarely have we seen a champion take the crown who did not drive the best season.
In 2025, it’s hard to say if Norris outperformed his rivals. He expertly pounced on opportunities to scrape back in the late season, but when it boils down, if he were to swap cars with Verstappen, he’d be qualifying much further down the grid.
Nobody will say he’s a better driver than the Dutchman and countless will argue Piastri still has his measure in terms of reliability and ability under pressure, even with his hiccups this year.
Even at the last race with everything on the line, Piastri was able to pull off a symbolic (but ultimately futile) overtake on Norris in the first lap.
If team orders weren’t against him all year, Piastri’s move might have been much more consequential.
I struggle to reimagine that scenario with Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel or Verstappen conceding a place to begin their championship decider.
Piastri did have a few catastrophic slip-ups in the back half of the season, which some conspiracy theorists will scandalously say was brought on by foul play, but the big picture tells a much simpler story of a ferociously competitive and worthy underdog fighting against a tide created by his own team.
At the end of the day, these drivers are paid ridiculous salaries and it’s just entertainment. Piastri will survive, thanks to his $40 million pay packet and a three month summer break.
But he’s learned a very important lesson about the limits of merit in the face of popularity and tribalism.
Thoughts? alexander.blair@news.com.au
Originally published as Lando Norris was the sport’s favourite to win the F1 title and there’s nothing you can do about it
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