Lando Norris is resurgent, but his biggest test yet arrives in Spain

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Lando Norris isn’t getting carried away after winning the Monaco Grand Prix. One third of the way through the 2025 Formula One season, he still trails McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri in the points standings.

“What I felt this weekend was a small step forward,” Norris, the pre-season favorite, said after clinching Monaco glory. “But it’s not it. It’s not like I’ve nailed it now and everything’s back.”

Norris’s Monaco victory was magic — but it was only his second grand prix win of a campaign his McLaren team has dominated. Piastri has won four races.

Simply put, Norris’s bounce-back win in Monaco will mean little if he lets the points gap swell back up from three at the Spanish Grand Prix this weekend. But the pressure is also on his ice-cool teammate. In 2024, Barcelona was the scene of one of Piastri’s biggest defeats to Norris. While his teammate started on pole and pushed Max Verstappen for victory, Piastri qualified 10th and finished over 30 seconds down. It was the sort of result that often leads Verstappen’s Red Bull to be declared a one-car team.

Piastri was undone by in-race tire management. Barcelona is one of the stiffest tests for drivers in such matters. It’s not like Bahrain, which Piastri won this year, where it’s all about keeping rear tire temperatures in check by avoiding traction-heavy moments on the rough surface. Barcelona’s many sequences of long, fast corners mean the tire challenge swings rapidly from overstressed fronts to overstressed rears. Most tracks just test one axle.

Already in 2025, Piastri has shown he can record impressive year-on-year turnarounds at specific tracks. He won in China, having been badly off the pace when Norris shone there in 2024. When asked about that in Shanghai, Piastri replied in his delightfully dry style that “saying I struggled a little bit last year is being pretty nice.” It was actually how McLaren team boss Andrea Stella had phrased it. If he can improve year-on-year in Spain, too, things look tricky for Norris.

Hanging over both McLaren drivers is the second weekend in succession where rule changes will dominate the discourse. Much like F1 contrived to alienate plenty of its fans with its artificial Monaco rules — and for what it’s worth, I thought that race was more interesting than a procession, but can see why it irritated others, as there was no racing art on display — now the car design rules are changing mid-season.

Even before the 2025 campaign began, the FIA had declared that it would further clamp down on flexi-front wings from the Spanish event. Effectively, this meant the FIA, F1’s governing body, felt some existing designs were eventually impermissible. Allowed for some of the season, but not the rest. As if the NFL only allowed the ‘tush push’ for most of the first half of a season. Sure.

McLaren is known to have made great strides with aeroelasticity technology within the current rules, which has helped it move ahead of the F1 pack.

Therefore, some in the paddock believe the pecking order is set for a reset in Spain. Lewis Hamilton, however, isn’t convinced. “It will have an effect. It affects (car handling) balance a bit, but it’s not massive,” the Ferrari driver said in Monaco. “But it affects everyone pretty much the same, so I can’t see it making much difference.”

Other senior figures in the paddock insist that every car will have to change in some respects as a result of this intervention. We cannot yet know how that will fully turn out. Still, tiny adjustments in car design have already changed the form book between the McLaren drivers, considering its mid- to late-season results in 2024 and how it has started the current season as pack leader.

Norris just can’t push to the limit in big braking zones after the development of the MCL39, which features a complex front suspension system that impacts how the drivers feel the car under braking load. This forces him into regular mistakes on the fastest laps in qualifying.

Piastri is encountering the same thing, but to a lesser extent. An example of this is how both McLaren drivers blew the sprint pole in China, which went to Hamilton. Norris just blew it more.

Norris closed on Piastri in the standings in Monaco. (Clive Rose / Getty Images)

What is now a matter of historical record is how Norris has won the two most chaotic races held in 2025: Melbourne and Monaco. In Australia, he made only a minor mistake when the rain came down again, which did for Piastri’s home race challenge, and then he saw off the intense pressure of Verstappen charging in slippery conditions, where the Dutchman is normally the best in F1. In Monaco, he dealt with the brainpower-sapping challenge of Monte Carlo’s close walls over 78 laps and the twists of the enforced pit stop strategy for this year’s contest.

As Verstappen tried to back Norris into Charles Leclerc late on last weekend — cannily playing what circumstances he could in the lead Red Bull — the eventual winner was unruffled.

Once out of his car and reflecting on his resurgent weekend, Norris declared that McLaren still needs to give him “the equipment, the things I need from the car to excel and maximise results, and the differences from last year to this year.” Clearly, the at-the-limit braking issue isn’t fully solved, as McLaren has yet to bring the necessary new parts. Monaco has few of these places anyway.

But Norris’s season to this point also hasn’t been as bad as some see it.

In China, the chance to see if Norris could attack Piastri late in the tire management challenge main race was denied due to a brake pedal problem. In Jeddah, he was clearly the quicker McLaren driver before his Q3 crash, as poor as that was. And then in Miami, he was again superior overall, but lost the grand prix there thanks to his Turn 2 off while dicing with Verstappen.

Piastri has been better than many expected this year, and F1 fans and executives should be thankful that this isn’t a repeat of 2023, when Verstappen dominated while Sergio Perez put in result after result that foreshadowed what he called a “nightmare” Spanish GP in 2024.

Whatever comes of this season’s engaging title fight, Norris can reflect on two impressive performance peaks in Melbourne and now Monaco.

(Top photo: Rudy Carezzevoli / Getty Images)

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