McLaren’s Oscar Piastri is targeting the Formula 1 championship in 2025 after his team principal, Andrea Stella, promised “equal opportunities” for both drivers’ title campaigns ahead of the new season.
Piastri occasionally found himself playing a support role to Lando Norris last year as his more experienced teammate made a late, but ultimately unsuccessful, bid to beat Max Verstappen to the title.
Norris had been more consistent than Piastri in the early rounds of the season when McLaren was struggling for performance, and emerged as Verstappen’s only real title rival in the second half of the season.
With both McLaren drivers starting from zero ahead of the new campaign and their car expected to be among the favourites, Piastri is setting his sights as high as possible.
“It’s definitely a clean slate,” Piastri said. “Everyone is starting on zero again and I think last season towards the end it was natural that I still had the opportunities to go out and put my best foot forward.
“Yes, there was a couple of situations where I ended up helping out Lando but there was some where he still helped out me. So it wasn’t as clear cut as that.
“But yeah, definitely we are starting on a clean slate and I do think that I can become world champion this year.
“I feel like 12 months ago I was going into the season still with some weaknesses that I wasn’t particularly confident with. I think through last season I addressed them.
“It’s now just about addressing them every weekend and making sure that I’m putting my best foot forward every weekend and that is what is going to be the difference.”
Team orders became the main talking point around McLaren in the second half of the 2024 season.
At the Hungarian Grand Prix, diverging tyre strategies saw Norris shuffled ahead of Piastri on track before the pit wall asked Norris to give the lead of the race back to his teammate — an order Norris initially seemed reluctant to obey before letting Piastri through.
As the season progressed, Norris’ points advantage over Piastri meant eyebrows were raised once more when the Australian made an aggressive pass on his teammate on the opening lap of the Italian Grand Prix and finished ahead of him. Although the move was clean, Norris not only lost a place to Piastri, but also Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and finished behind both.
Ahead of the next round in Azerbaijan, the team said it would favour Norris in 50/50 situations, although Piastri went on to win the race on the streets of Baku with the help of Norris, who qualified out of position.
With the new season just over a month away, team principal Stella said he was pleased to have a situation where the two drivers are free to fight each other for the title this year.
“So the team is in the lucky position of having two drivers that can contend for victories, like they have already proven, and can contend for championships if the car will be good enough to actually be competitive,” he said. “The main aspect is that both drivers start the season with equal opportunities, and our fundamentals are based on the racing principles that we already used last year.
“We used them for very good conversations, we reviewed last season, and I was actually quite proud of last season. We reviewed all the situations in which there was a proximity between the two drivers, and I was quite impressed by how well they behaved.
“So we started from the equal opportunities and the racing principles. For me, one point I’m quite proud to share is that when we reviewed last season, the drivers and the team — most of the time represented by myself — we always looked at ourselves: ‘I could have done this better,’ rather than Lando saying ‘Oscar should have done this better,’ and Oscar saying ‘Lando should have done this better.’
“So I think we take some learning from last year, but already I think that was positive in terms of how we interacted and acted together as a team, and then we will start from this concept of equal opportunities and our racing principles.
“And the racing principles, it’s important to say, they are representative not only of what the team believes in terms of how we go racing, but also what the drivers believe as to how we go racing, because if a driver is not fully into these principles, then that’s not the right driver for McLaren.”
