Oscar Piastri's plan to avoid McLaren favouring Lando Norris with team orders in 2025
Oscar Piastri's plan to avoid McLaren favouring Lando Norris with team orders in 2025
Share:
Oscar Piastri is on a mission to avoid playing second fiddle to Lando Norris again this year. Norris took most of the plaudits in 2024 as far as McLaren were concerned. He was the driver who ran eventual champion Max Verstappen closest and won four Grands Prix - the last of which in Abu Dhabi was the one that sealed the constructors' championship title for his team.
But it was still a very fine season for Piastri, too. In just his second year as an F1 driver, he won twice and scored a huge haul of 292 points on the way to an impressive fourth-placed finish in the drivers' standings. He would surely have managed more, had he not been in a supporting role to his team-mate's title challenge in the latter half of the year. The Australian was happy to be a team player, accepting that he did not have as many points as Norris when the time came to make the call.
But this year he is out to make sure that he doesn't give McLaren a reason to sideline him again. "You want to earn absolutely everything you can on merit. It [team orders] happened once and it went both ways," he told RacingNews365. "I think the most important thing for me is to make sure I have a better position in the world championship standings, which in some ways I am not subject to, because if we were equal in points, it would not have been an issue.
"I think it's important for me to put myself in a stronger position initially. That's probably the biggest lesson I can take from this. I think I just need to make sure that I score the points and that I maximise my chances, because that really led to the team orders, so that's my goal.".
