Andrea Stella wants you to believe Lando Norris has simply become a better driver since winning the title. What he is not saying quite so loudly is that Oscar Piastri has quietly fallen apart, and McLaren’s championship defence now rests on one man’s shoulders rather than two.
A month ago this title defence looked dead in the water. Heading into the Hungarian Grand Prix, Kimi Antonelli sat on 204 points while Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri combined couldn’t even match that number between them. Then Hungary happened. A chunky upgrade landed on the MCL40, focused on front and rear corner bodywork plus a new floor and rear wing, and Norris promptly won from pole. He then repeated the trick in Zandvoort with a bold move around the outside of Antonelli at Turn 1. Suddenly he’s ‘only’ 83 points behind. Funny how a decent upgrade can rewrite a narrative overnight.
Stella’s Convenient Framing
The tidy explanation is that the car got faster and Norris cashed in. But McLaren team principal Andrea Stella isn’t keen on that version of events. Speaking after the Dutch Grand Prix, he insisted Norris himself has stepped up, not just the machinery underneath him.
“Lando is driving and operating at a very high level, in absolute sense, in relation to a Formula 1 world champion. He’s driving at the level of a world champion.” – Andrea Stella
That’s a curious thing to say about someone who already is a world champion, but Stella’s point, as reported by Motorsport.com, is that Norris keeps evolving rather than resting on last year’s crown. Whether that’s genuine insight or just the sort of thing team bosses say about their in-form driver to keep the vibes positive is a fair question to ask.
The Numbers Piastri Would Rather Forget
Here’s where the story gets uncomfortable for the other side of the McLaren garage. Through the whole of 2025, Norris and Piastri were dead level on qualifying pace, a perfect 15-15 split across qualifying and sprint qualifying. New regulations arrived for 2026 and Norris started 3-1 up before the season’s unexpected April break. Since then, though, it’s been a rout: 12-1 to Norris, with Piastri only quicker in Monaco. The average margin, 0.128 seconds, sounds trivial until you realise how consistently it’s landed in Norris’s favour.
Stella admits there’s a genuine puzzle on Piastri’s side of the garage, referencing “a question mark” over how his tyres behaved in the second stint at Zandvoort. That’s team-principal speak for “we don’t fully know what’s going wrong,” which is not exactly reassuring if you’re an Australian trying to salvage a title challenge that’s already 138 points adrift of the championship lead.
Assertiveness or Just Confidence Dressed Up as a Skill
Stella’s favourite word for describing the new Norris is “assertiveness,” and he’s particularly fond of the Turn 1 move on Antonelli in Zandvoort as evidence of it.
“The manoeuvre to pass Antonelli today is a really good demonstration of that. He’s demonstrating more self-confidence.” – Andrea Stella
Stella goes further, framing restraint as its own form of confidence, the idea that Norris sometimes chooses not to fight for position early on because he trusts he’ll be quick enough to find another opportunity later in the race.
“Sometimes you are self-confident when you think like, ‘You know what? I’m not going to have a fight now because I may lose in this fight. It’s a very long race. See you at the end of the race.’ It’s this confidence in your means, in your strength, that I quite like.” – Andrea Stella
It’s a nice theory, and it fits neatly with the fact that in his last two wins Norris didn’t even hold the lead into the first corner. But it’s worth remembering that this is also exactly the kind of thing a team principal says when his driver is winning. Nobody was calling Norris “assertive” back when he was fluffing restarts and moaning on the radio in 2024. Confidence, it turns out, follows results rather than the other way round.
What This Actually Means for the Title Fight
Strip away the praise and the real story here is simple. McLaren’s championship hopes are no longer a two-driver operation, they’re a one-driver operation with a passenger. Antonelli still leads by a hefty margin, George Russell and Lewis Hamilton are level on points behind him, and Norris sits fourth having clawed back ground almost entirely off his own back. Piastri, meanwhile, is down in seventh, a driver who was matching his team-mate lap for lap a year ago now looking like he’s driving with the handbrake half on.
Stella can dress this up as a story about Norris’s personal growth all he likes, and there’s probably truth in it. But growth on one side of the garage doesn’t fix a car that one driver seemingly can’t extract performance from. If McLaren wants to seriously threaten Mercedes and Ferrari for the constructors’ title too, having only one driver in form is a considerably worse position than having two. Norris finding another gear is a lovely story. It’s also, conveniently, the only story McLaren has left to tell.
