McLaren driver Oscar Piastri claimed his second victory of the F1 2024 season in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in Baku.
Piastri‘s win helped McLaren take the lead of the Constructors’ Championship, with Ferrari driver and polesitter Charles Leclerc forced to settle for second and Mercedes driver George Russell in third. Here are our conclusions from Azerbaijan…
Conclusions from the 2024 Azerbaijan Grand Prix
Oscar Piastri is emerging as McLaren’s best bet for an F1 2025 title charge
Sport? It’s not about the body, but the mind. At least it is at the elite level.
With the overall talent level at the upper limits of the capabilities of the human body, with the differences in ability from one athlete to the next so fine, it is the one whose technique holds firm and remains accessible under pressure who often wins.
It is in this area – call it temperament, call it nerve, call it certainty – where you will find the intrinsic difference between the two McLaren drivers.
Put simply, if Oscar Piastri knows that he belongs, Lando Norris, with his poor starts, errors at critical moments and heart worn on his sleeve, has always needed some convincing that he does too.
For most of their time as team-mates Norris has held a small but significant advantage over Piastri, owing largely to his greater experience and his fuller understanding of the Pirelli tyres, a key element of modern F1 notoriously tricky for young drivers to get to grips with.
Yet now Piastri is growing stronger by the race – his data banks expanding, his confidence building, his weaknesses disappearing – the point has now been reached where Norris will not be able to contain him for much longer.
And this just as McLaren were leaning towards casting Piastri in a support role for the remainder of the season…
Oscar Piastri vs Lando Norris: F1 2024 head-to-head battles
Much has been made over the last 18 months of the parallels between Piastri and Max Verstappen and the way Oscar too has a former F1 driver in his corner – Mark Webber, like Jos, putting into practice the mistakes of his own career to make his protege the toughest, most complete competitor he can possibly be.
This, Piastri’s second career victory, was a win of which Verstappen himself, that great mentality monster, would be proud, seizing brilliantly and decisively the only chance he had to pass Leclerc and then nervelessly repelling Charles’ efforts to get the lead back.
For lap after lap he absorbed the pressure and tried his best to ignore the Ferrari darting around in his mirrors, concentrating on perfecting the braking zones, creating as big a gap as possible before the DRS detection zones and covering the inside of Turn 1, something Leclerc had inexplicably failed to do in the decisive moment of the race.
Right until the moment the Ferrari’s rear tyres cried enough with a couple of laps to go, freeing Piastri (whose appreciation for the power of clean air, it has become apparent, is matched only by Fernando Alonso) to escape to a beautifully measured victory.
Finally seeing what everyone else saw on Saturday night on Monza, McLaren belatedly began talking up their F1 2024 title chances heading to Baku, indicating a preparedness to support Norris where possible – but only in specific circumstances, you see – in that classic muddled McLaren way of doing things.
