Does Oscar Piastri seem much more like the championship favourite after Norris’ unfortunate retirement in Zandvoort swung the gap between them from nine to 34 points? – Andrew<\/b><\/p>\n
Norris admitted after the Dutch Grand Prix that the oil leak that caused his retirement in Zandvoort had “only made it harder for me and put me under more pressure”.<\/p>\n
Thirty-four points is certainly a substantial lead for Piastri with nine races to go, especially for a driver who has been so solid this year and is, in Norris’ words, “good in pretty much every situation”.<\/p>\n
That points lead is the equivalent of a win and a fifth place. To put it another way, Norris would need to win the next five races with Piastri in second each time to take back the lead of the championship.<\/p>\n
So, of course – in that context – Piastri is now a stronger favourite than before – but it could be argued he was a reasonably strong favourite, anyway.<\/p>\n
It’s hard to think of anything Piastri has done wrong since he and Norris spun together at the Australian Grand Prix at the start of the season – an incident from which Norris was able to recover to win, but Piastri was left a ninth-place finish, because of where each ended up when they encountered a late-race downpour.<\/p>\n
Piastri already had a nine-point lead heading to Zandvoort, and that would have grown to 16 had Norris finished second rather than retired. It’s also worth bearing in mind Piastri could easily have arrived there with a 27-point advantage already.<\/p>\n
His penalty in Silverstone<\/a> was controversial, and some believe that by rights he should have won in Hungary.<\/a><\/p>\n McLaren’s policy of allowing their drivers freedom to choose different strategies to try to beat their team-mate is what enabled Norris to recover from losing ground at the start to beat Piastri there.<\/p>\n Piastri himself insisted he did not feel hard done by, but there are senior people in other teams who think he had the right to, given standard team-management arrangements, which usually favour the lead driver with strategy.<\/p>\n Despite Norris’ strong recovery since McLaren made a front-suspension tweak in Canada to help him with his feeling for the front axle, Piastri has unquestionably been McLaren’s more consistent performer this season, having impressively stepped up his game since last year.<\/p>\n Having said that, Piastri’s lead is far from insurmountable. Bigger advantages have been overturned in shorter times before.<\/p>\n In 2007, for example, Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen was 17 points behind – the equivalent of 43 now, as there was a different points system – with two races to go, and still beat McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton to the title.<\/p>\n In 2012, Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso had a 39-point lead over Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel with seven races to go, but Vettel still managed to recover and win the title. Admittedly, Vettel had a significant car advantage, and Alonso had some very bad luck.<\/p>\n And in 2014 and 2016, Lewis Hamilton several times recovered large gaps to team-mate Nico Rosberg. In 2014, successfully, and in 2016 not so, but only just, and only because of an engine failure while he was leading in Malaysia.<\/p>\n It’s still under Norris’ control. And as he put it: “It’s almost a big enough gap now that I can just chill out about it and just go for it.”<\/p>\n If he manages to keep that mindset, stays calm, and delivers his absolute best, Norris can still do it. It certainly won’t be easy. But then F1 is not meant to be. It’s meant to test people to their limits against the very best.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Does Oscar Piastri seem much more like the championship favourite after Norris’ unfortunate retirement in Zandvoort swung the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":247540,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4103],"tags":[4199,707,4200,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-391537","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-f1","8":"tag-f1","9":"tag-formula-1","10":"tag-formula1","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115133979394386711","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}