Oscar Piastri has taken a clear step forwards in 2025 so far. Noticeably improved in areas that he was clearly weaker than Lando Norris during their first two years as teammates. Many fans expected a Hamilton or Verstappen-esque rookie season from Piastri. As one of the few drivers that have won both the F3 and F2 titles on their first attempt, together with Lewis Hamilton, Charles Leclerc, George Russell and Nico Hülkenburg (Gabriel Bortoleto has also joined this prestigious group on the grid this year).

However, Piastri had a solid but not extraordinary first season in 2023 finishing 9th in the championship compared to Norris’ 6th. Not a bad rookie season by any means but maybe slightly underwhelming given the hype at the start of the year.

Piastri’s issues were quite clear, lacking pace in qualifying, struggling on tracks he had never been to before, managing the tyres when degradation was high and general consistency race to race.

Again, going into his second year in 2024, expectations were high, and although there were some stand out drives at Silverstone, Monza and Baku, Norris still quite clearly had the measure of him over the course of the year and concerningly, many of the same deficiencies from year one remained. Losing the Grand Prix qualifying head to head 20-4 was a tough blow that indicated his peak pace still wasn’t where it needed to be. The race head to head (GP’s only) was 16-8 in Norris’ favour too.

Now with the caveat of only being four races into the season in 2025, Piastri appears to finally be at the level a lot of people expected maybe a year earlier. Minus, a mistake in the wet in Australia (where he was arguably the quicker McLaren in the race), he has looked fast and mature in his approach.

The first test of China, a race where everybody struggled with the tyres, he managed his pace out front perfectly and took a dominant victory. In Japan neither of the two McLaren’s managed to hook up a clean lap in Q3 which was really was the end of the race before it began with dirty air playing a massive role in deciding the outcome. Again though, Piastri was at least marginally quicker than Norris in race trim, unable to pass (as was most of the rest of the grid) but sitting around 0.7 behind Norris for the second half of the race surely indicated he had some more to give. Bahrain was another dominant weekend for Piastri. His teammate Norris definitely was struggling with the car but Piastri didn’t put a foot wrong and took home a well earned 25 points.

The pace and consistency many thought Piastri was capable of is starting to show. Seemingly the weaknesses from the previous two years have been addressed while his strengths of a cool head and high IQ race craft remain. Sitting just four points behind Lando Norris after the Bahrain Grand Prix, the combination of both Piastri and McLaren getting their act together this should be great to watch this year.

Header Image by Steffen Prößdorf, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons