A year ago, Oscar Piastri looked like he had one hand on the Formula 1 world championship trophy as he headed to Monza with a 34-point lead after McLaren team-mate Lando Norris's Zandvoort failure.

But Zandvoort 2025 was the last time Piastri won a grand prix. Norris has won the last two grands prix and Piastri is 55 points and three places behind his team-mate in seventh in the standings. Piastri was extremely unlucky in the Hungary race that Norris won but he could/should have, but in the Netherlands he finished over half a minute behind Norris in sixth.

Norris has been the more impressive McLaren performer on balance this season, so what's going on with Piastri?

Edd Straw, Mark Hughes and Val Khorounzhiy debated that in The Race F1 Podcast's latest episode.

The driving style issue

Mark Hughes: I see him struggling more with this generation of car especially in low-grip situations. And that was exposed a little bit at the tail end of last year when we got on the low-grip circuits, Mexico in particular.

These cars now have less downforce and are running on smaller tyres with higher tyre pressures. Piastri does still seem to be trying to drive it in his natural way with a later turn-in, more on the steering - similar to what's happening with George Russell, but I think Russell is a little bit further along with understanding it and ironing it out.

I would say Norris has a much more malleable style in terms of how he's working the car. He needs the front end to get introduced into the corner, but he doesn't demand everything of it immediately in the way that Oscar does. Sometimes you then get into a situation where you've induced an understeer and then you've got so much lock on that when the front finally does grip up, then you've got an oversteer snap and you've lost time going in and you've lost time coming out.

You then look at set-up changes to try to alleviate that, but it takes the car further away from its ideal sweet spot and the problem compounds.

We've seen the level that Oscar can perform to and that won't have changed. It's just a question of finding that sweet spot again and getting the car to work around that.

Is the narrative fair?

Edd Straw: It's important not to swing too hard with the narratives. There were times last year when people would say Piastri was certain to win the championship and he'd made Norris look like a fraud.

Now Norris has turned things around and people say Piastri is rubbish.

So many things go into making each of these individual race weekends work. It's so complicated - and really tiny differences can look enormous.

But I wouldn't say Piastri's had a bad season as such. He led at Suzuka. At the Hungaroring he was struggling for pace but he drove a fantastic race before Carlos Sainz hit him. He was on a trajectory to win a race he wasn't really quick enough to win.

There's still been a lot of good. It would be a real mistake to portray him as some kind of ghostly figure alongside Norris at McLaren who needs to get out.

He's still improving

Val Khorounzhiy: You judge team-mates against each other and by and large it's a zero-sum game. When one rises, the other must fall.

But there's just not very much to be judging Piastri with based on this season. Take into account the fact that this is a guy who didn't start the first two races of the season and that McLaren's car is still evolving.

Go back to the qualifying element. Piastri is a driver where you can trace a weekend through all the practice sessions, maybe even Q1 and Q2 and think he's half a step behind Norris and that he's really in trouble. Then suddenly come Q3, maybe he won't beat Norris, but he's only half a tenth off. Where did that come from?

Norris had got used to a fairly comfortable life with Daniel Ricciardo next to him. Whenever the two were out on track together, you could count on Norris just obliterating him in terms of laptime. And here comes Piastri, who you think you have a handle on through the weekend, and then boom, something happens. I imagine that would have been a culture shock for Norris that maybe he took half a season to deal with.

It is still alarming to see weekends where Piastri's 30 seconds off his team-mate at the finish. That's never good. He's obviously still going to be a work in progress in year four in F1. But if he is a generational superstar or whatever, then you would have ideally liked weekends like that to not show up anymore, the way they maybe don't show up for a lot of the other top drivers.

But he's working. We know he can improve parts of his game. It's a safe bet to expect him to improve this part and get better at adapting to these cars and become more of a sort of adjustable driver like Norris, even if maybe he will never quite be Norris.