How Piastri gained from a battle Norris couldn’t win

“If you no longer go for a gap, you are no longer a racing driver.”

Ayrton Senna’s scolding words to Jackie Stewart, apropos Ayrton’s polarising first-corner swoop on Alain Prost in the 1990 Japanese Grand Prix which left both of them in the gravel, continue to resonate down the years. Often used as a condescending mic drop in online debate, it is a sentiment Lando Norris echoed when questioned whether, with hindsight, he would have tackled the first two corners of the 2025 Miami Grand Prix differently.

“There’s a gap. I’ve got to go for it. I’m not going to back out,” he said.

Norris’s problems began in qualifying, a phase of every weekend in which McLaren’s MCL39 continues to vex both its drivers. While undoubtedly the fastest car on the grid over a race distance, a fact underlined by McLaren annihilating its rivals in Miami, when pushed to the limits over a single lap it can bite – Norris especially has complained that its lack of feedback interrupts his “flow”.

It has high limits but doesn’t signal their imminent arrival clearly enough; over the balance of the season Oscar Piastri has coped better than Norris, but not here in Miami, where a lock-up in Q3 consigned him to fourth on the grid behind Max Verstappen, Norris and Mercedes’ Andrea Kimi Antonelli.

“It’s a car that offers its best when you are in continuous laps rather than the one-off lap in which you push 100%,” is how team principal Andrea Stella puts it.

On a hot day in Miami, the MCL39’s well-documented kindness to its rear tyres was always likely to have a significant bearing on the outcome of the race, regardless of the McLarens not locking out the front row. But here it is too easy to allow hindsight to start bleeding into our assessment of probabilities.

Max made it to Turn 1 first – just – but locked up and slid wide while doing so, affording Lando a run up the inside line, which then became the outside line as the track flowed left through Turn 2. There the Red Bull picked up another twitch and stepped over to the right as Verstappen corrected the slide, forcing Norris to run off the road or be collected.

That dropped him to sixth place and began the chain of shoulda-woulda-couldas. Piastri had rather less on his plate, needing only to not get stuck behind Antonelli (whom he passed on lap four) and then bridge the gap to Verstappen.

“From that point onwards I knew I had a good pace advantage,” said Oscar, “and clearly the car was unbelievable.”

As Piastri was dealing with Antonelli, Norris was shaping up to pass Alex Albon’s Williams for fifth. Three laps later he moved decisively past George Russell at the unusual overtaking venue of Turn 4 as the Mercedes struggled on the outlier choice of hard-compound Pirellis for the opening stint.

In short order Norris dispatched Antonelli, confirming the McLaren’s spectacular race pace, and began to reel in the leading duo as Piastri began to probe Verstappen’s defences on lap 10. For his part Max knew the game was up, pace-wise, so he focused on making the McLaren drivers’ jobs as difficult as possible.

“I had nothing to lose so I also just wanted to have a bit of fun out there,” he said.

Lando Norris, McLaren, Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images

“They [McLaren] were just miles faster than everyone else on a track where the thermal degradation is very high. Yeah, they just have a massive advantage, that’s quite clear.”

Verstappen sturdily occupied the inside line at every possible braking point, signifying that the only way round was the long one. After probing his defences and getting nowhere, Piastri checkmated his opponent at the start of lap 14, getting close enough on the approach to Turn 1 to prompt a lock-up which sent Max wide, enabling Oscar to pick up the inside line and clear off into the distance.

Norris then made heavier weather of passing Verstappen, lunging at Turn 11 on lap 18 but sending them both off the track boundaries and into the run-off area. He took the prudent option of immediately handing the position back. A lap later he made the pass stick, but by then Piastri was the best part of 10s up the road.

Barring mistakes or reliability issues, the only factor standing in the way of a McLaren victory now was rain, but the forecast heavy shower only skirted the area. Still, it made for a nervy few moments since its expected arrival coincided with the optimal pitstop window opening for those who had started on mediums, and nobody wanted to be caught out having to return to the pits for inters.

Although this threat evaporated, Verstappen was falling into the hands of the two Mercedes drivers and, when Antonelli pitted on lap 25 in a clear attempt to perform an undercut, Red Bull responded by bringing Verstappen in a lap later for hard Pirellis. Antonelli’s stop wasn’t quick enough to derive any benefit, and both drivers then paid the price for the early stop when the Ferrari power unit in Oliver Bearman’s Haas expired, causing a Virtual Safety Car deployment on lap 29.

This enabled McLaren to bring both its drivers in for new hards inexpensively in terms of time lost, and on the same lap. Russell was another beneficiary, emerging on fresh mediums in third place.

Lando Norris, McLaren

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

Although Norris was able to make some inroads into Piastri’s lead (“maybe not the strongest second half of a race in my life,” said Oscar) he never got close enough to challenge and was over four seconds in arrears at the chequered flag.

Piastri is not one to externalise emotions, but he was moved in parc ferme to perform a ‘Griddy’, the signature jig of NFL player Justin Jefferson. Aside from impressing members of the TikTok generation, this little dance showed how little he had been expecting to win – it was the result of a lost bet with Jefferson himself.

“Ultimately, yes, I won the race this weekend, but I think the likelihood of winning many races [after] qualifying fourth is pretty low,” he said. “I did a lot of things right today, but there was definitely some good fortune there as well, and a very quick car.”

Norris was left to deal with a barrage of questions concerning how he might have done things differently. Should he have backed off into Turn 2 and simply waited his moment to deploy the McLaren’s superior race pace? Did he manifest inferior racecraft to his team-mate in making the job of finally dispatching Max look difficult?

“We both got past him, but, you know, you’ve just got to be in the perfect place,” Norris reflected. “In the end, he just let me go. He didn’t even put up a fight at the end, so… It just depends how much he wants to fight you. It’s Max.”

Earlier, during the rather absurd tableau of the post-race interviews being conducted in the back of a flatbed truck, Norris had put his finger on the problem he faced in this race.

“What can I say? If I don’t go for it, people complain. If I go for it, people complain, so you can’t win.”

Well, if you no longer go for a gap…