Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli will look to strengthen his grip on the Formula 1 drivers’ championship at his home race, the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, this weekend.
The 20-year-old faces a growing challenge from resurgent McLaren, particularly Lando Norris, who has won the past two Grands Prix. Monza is also home territory for Ferrari, although the circuit’s long straights may not suit the characteristics of their car.
BBC Sport F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers the latest questions ahead of round 13 of the 2026 season.
What does Lando Norris’ contract extension mean for Oscar Piastri?
There is clearly some tension behind the scenes, and Piastri’s performance and development have dipped this season.
Oscar Piastri has not started the campaign as strongly as he did last year. In 2025, the Australian appeared on course to challenge for his first world title for much of the season, before his campaign unravelled during the final third.
This year, team-mate Lando Norris has won two races and should have won a third in Miami. Piastri has looked capable of victory only in Japan, where he was leading before being unlucky with the safety car, and Hungary, where Norris took his first win of the year.
Piastri took the lead in Hungary after Norris made an error on the opening lap. However, he was delayed while lapping Carlos Sainz’s Williams, allowing Norris to retake the advantage. Piastri acknowledged that it would have been difficult to keep Norris behind even if he had retained the lead because his pace on the hard tyres was poor. The issue ultimately became irrelevant when he retired with a broken gearbox.
The qualifying head-to-head statistics are uncomfortable for Piastri, with Norris leading 12-4. However, their actual one-lap pace is much closer, with Norris only 0.08 seconds faster on average.
Norris has nevertheless been the more convincing race performer, which explains the 55-point and three-place gap between the McLaren drivers in the championship.
Why has Piastri struggled against Norris?
Several factors may be contributing to the difference between the two drivers.
Piastri has traditionally been strong through high-speed corners. However, fewer of those corners are grip-limited this year because the engines often use them to charge the battery, reducing one potential area of advantage for the Australian. All the drivers have complained about this change.
The cars also have less downforce than last season, and Piastri is less comfortable than Norris in low-grip conditions.
There is also no doubt that Norris consistently raised his performance level during the second half of last season on his way to winning the world title. He has continued to improve this year and is unquestionably one of the drivers of the season so far.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said at the most recent race in the Netherlands: “Last year, we had seen already with Oscar that, from a technical driving point of view, when the car has this low level of grip, like we saw last year for instance in Mexico or in Austin, he needs to adapt the way he drives, the way he thinks, the driving, his expectations.”
“This requires a bit of mental effort, which gets him to lose a couple of tenths of a second because you sort of have to process rather than drive through pure instinct because what happens is what you expect.”
“So it’s one of those cases in which you have to adapt your natural driving style to the demand of the car. So it stays in the space of driving and in the space of the technical side of things. I don’t think it has anything to do with any psychological kind of opportunity. This is purely technical.”
Stella also stressed that the leading three teams are closely matched, meaning, as he put it, “as soon as things are not optimised, then you may have a very significant positional loss – it’s very brutal from this point of view”.
Could McLaren still pursue Max Verstappen?
McLaren and Piastri reject suggestions that there is tension in their relationship. However, McLaren did try to sign Max Verstappen this summer, and it is virtually certain that Piastri would have been replaced if the deal had gone through.
That possibility has receded for now following Verstappen’s new contract with Red Bull. However, the agreement includes performance clauses. If Red Bull continue to struggle next year, McLaren may make another attempt to sign Verstappen.
For now, Piastri is under contract until at least the end of 2027. His focus will be on returning to the level of performance he knows he can deliver.
