The F1 drivers' championship could come down to a battle of teammates

For the first time in nine years, an intrateam battle is being waged for this season's Formula One drivers' championship.

McLaren has been the most consistent this season, and its drivers, Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris, the standout performers. Since the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix at the end of April, Piastri has led the drivers' standings, with Norris second. Ahead of this weekend's Singapore Grand Prix, the 18th of 24 races, they are separated by 25 points.

"For one of us, it's going to be a pretty amazing time, and for the other it's going to be pretty painful," Piastri said in a news conference in September. "The team is very sensitive to that, which is nice."

Piastri could become the first Australian to win the title since Alan Jones in 1980; Norris would be the 11th Briton, joining some of the greats of the sport, such as Lewis Hamilton, Jackie Stewart, Jim Clark and Graham Hill.

"The intensity will naturally increase as we get closer to the end of the year, and I'm ready for that," Piastri said. "I've been in that position before in other championships. That kind of feeling and that countdown to the end of the year is the same."

Drivers’ standings



In 2019, Piastri won the Formula Renault Eurocup by 7.5 points. A year later, he won a tight race for the Formula Three championship, in which the top three drivers in the standings were separated by only 4 points.

By contrast, all of Norris' successes in the junior series were by wide margins. In 2018, the only blemish on his rise to Formula One was finishing runner-up in Formula Two to George Russell, now with Mercedes.

Last year, Norris finished second to Max Verstappen of Red Bull, who won his fourth consecutive F1 drivers' title by 63 points. But if Norris is again a runner-up, he will not see it as a failure.

"I'd have to say that I didn't succeed in what my goal was, but I don't think you can ever call it a failure because I don't believe I've failed anything," he said at a pre-British Grand Prix event in July.

"If things were much easier, and you don't achieve your goal, maybe you can call it a failure, but when it's 24 races, it's such a long season against the best in the world, so I don't think you can ever call it a failure. Maybe you didn't succeed."

Of the McLaren teammates, Norris has the greater experience. This is his seventh season in Formula One, competing in 145 Grands Prix. Piastri is in his third year and has made 63 starts. But the discrepancy counts for nothing as they are in equal machinery provided by McLaren.

Little has separated them this year. Piastri has seven victories and seven additional podiums; Norris has five wins and eight more podiums. Norris has failed to finish in two races and Piastri in just one.

Norris crashed into the back of Piastri in Canada in June and retired with a mechanical failure in the Dutch Grand Prix in August. Piastri crashed out on the first lap of the last race in Azerbaijan, ending a run of 34 consecutive Grands Prix in the points.

Both have been philosophical about the recent incidents that have blighted their championship chances.

"It was frustrating, but at the same time, the reasoning makes it pretty easy to move on," Norris said a week after the Dutch Grand Prix.

"If it had been something I'd done, I'd probably still be kicking myself, or pretty down about it. The fact is, it had nothing to do with me, my driving, or my decisions. So it's pretty easy to go, 'Well, this is life. What can I do?' It's surprisingly easy to put it behind me."

Piastri's error in the Azerbaijan race was of his own making. He also crashed in qualifying the day before, contributing to his worst weekend in Formula One.

"You're never going to feel amazing after a weekend like this," he said. "It's rare that I have so many executional errors, but I'm very much focused on putting that behind me.

"I would be much more concerned if these errors were because I was trying to make up time or something like that. Obviously, they are costly errors, but they are things which can be very easily rectified."

Despite a similar relaxed approach to their incidents, underneath the helmet, they are different characters. Piastri is calm, rarely shows emotion or makes errors; Norris is more prone to minor mistakes and wears his heart on his sleeve in dissecting them and his performances.

"For me, being calm is part of who I am," Piastri said. "I've learned through the years that that's how I get the most out of myself. It's not a magic thing, but that's how I feel I work best. It's partly natural, and partly through experience, through learning."

Norris is trying to change his ways. "It's been one of the things I've been working on a lot away from the track, separate from my driving. There's a change, and there are definitely things I've improved on.

"It doesn't mean that I don't get annoyed, frustrated or down when I don't do well, and when I've made mistakes, or if I lose out on pole or don't win races. I'm much better now in dealing with it and not letting it affect anything else, whether it's the people around me or my work. "

What separates this year's battle from past intrateam rivalries is a lack of on-track feistiness between the drivers. Other than Norris' clear mistake in running into the back of Piastri in Montreal, they have kept it clean.

It is in stark contrast to the bitterness of battles from years past, such as Hamilton and Nico Rosberg from 2014 to 2016 when Mercedes dominated; Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna at McLaren-Honda in 1988 and 1989; Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber at Red Bull, most notably in 2013; and Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet at Williams in 1986 and 1987.

Toto Wolff, the Mercedes team principal, said the Hamilton-Rosberg rivalry was much more intense.

"We had two different animals in the car. They were two fierce combatants who took no prisoners, racing against each other at times," he said at a news conference in September. "It was very difficult to manage, but I don't see that at McLaren."

Andrea Stella, the McLaren team principal, has so far kept his drivers true to the principles of his team's racing ethos.

"There is very, very little between our two drivers, and this is because they are racing at a very, very high level," Stella said in a news conference in July. "We are lucky at McLaren to have two drivers who are deservedly fighting for the world championship.

"I think the difference will be made by the accuracy, the precision, the quality of the execution. We, as a team, will try and make sure that from a reliability point of view, from a team operation point of view, that we are as good as possible, such that it will be the drivers deciding their own outcome in terms of competing for the drivers' world championship."

But there is another factor to consider. Verstappen has won the last two Grands Prix, in Italy and Azerbaijan. He is just 44 points behind Norris and 69 behind Piastri. With 199 points available in the rest of the season, the reigning champion cannot be discounted.

After Verstappen qualified on pole position for the race in Baku, Stella said, "a firm yes, and can you write it in capital letters" that Verstappen was a factor in the championship.

Verstappen's victory affirmed Stella's belief. "We knew Baku would be a difficult circuit for us, so we will see now in Singapore, which is a track on which we should perform well," he said.

"Hopefully, we can go back to fighting for victories, and then we will see how the rest of the championship will unfold. But definitely, Max is in contention for the drivers' championship. We knew it, and we got confirmation."

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.