Both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri gave a confident impression as they presented the 2025 McLaren Formula 1 car to the world on Thursday at a wet Silverstone.
Norris is adamant he has learned a huge amount from his first title battle, admittedly a long shot, last year and going up against now four-time world champion Max Verstappen wheel-to-wheel, having stewed over a number of confrontations in 2024 when he came off second best.
But Norris was still the driver scoring the most points on average once McLaren turned its MCL38 into a winning car in Miami, so there is little doubt that if the papaya squad can be competitive from the start, the 25-year-old will be right in the mix.
Then there is Piastri, who by his own admission was too inconsistent to keep pace with Norris in the championship, which forced him into a temporary number two role whenever the circumstances dictated it. McLaren has always been keen to stress it has two equal drivers, and sticking to its guns all the way until after September's Italian Grand Prix earned it praise in some corners for its fairness, but equally criticism in others for not imposing team orders earlier to maximise its chances of a double championship having eventually won the constructors' crown.
It was clear McLaren was still figuring stuff out as it went along, having not been in a title battle in its current iteration under CEO Zak Brown and team boss Andrea Stella. Its first version of the so-called ‘papaya rules’ still seemed to allow Piastri to make a risky lunge at Norris in Monza, which the 23-year-old pulled off deftly but still cost his team-mate not one but two positions.
The rules were then tidied up further in Baku, where McLaren openly said it would ask Piastri to support Norris when necessary. By that time it was arguably too late, with Piastri only able to move over for Norris in the Brazilian sprint before Verstappen struck the hammer blow in the sensational wet race that followed.
While McLaren was still learning how to be a title contender, so was Piastri, and the Australian now believes "I can be the world champion this year".
His two victories were punctuated by several weekends where Piastri felt he wasn't quite at the races, which in a tight battle at the front cost him too many spots in qualifying and too much work to do on Sundays, where he has also uncovered some weaknesses. But Piastri is now adamant that he addressed many of those "opportunities" and is relishing the prospect of starting from a clean slate.
"In terms of managing myself and Lando, obviously our target is to have every weekend be an easy one-two and make sure that we then fight for that," Piastri mused on the subject of McLaren's rules of engagement this year.
"Of course, we're going to be racing each other from the start. We're all starting on zero and I want to win the world championship this year and hopefully we have a car that's capable of doing that from the start.
"Everyone is going to have that mentality, you have to, but we are going to be able to race each other and we've shown time and time again that we can race each other hard but cleanly. As long as we're not taking points off of the team then that's how we're going to go racing."
Piastri is managed by Mark Webber and Ann Neal, who are sure to have played an important role navigating the young Australian through uncharted territory for him, but a familiar scenario for Webber. Webber unsuccessfully fought against the status of being a number two driver to Sebastian Vettel at Red Bull, and will now make sure to fight Piastri's corner so history doesn't repeat itself.
Norris acknowledged Piastri might well be his biggest threat if McLaren picks up in Australia where it left off in 2024, but says there is a joint responsibility between the drivers and the team to not let things derail.
"It's a different year, how we start the year just changes everything and I know Oscar's hungry for a championship," Norris pitched in. "For sure he's capable of winning a championship, but at the same time I'm taking one race at a time and that's our mentality of the team. Everyone knows that we want to beat each other and you want to be the top dog in the team and that's normal, that's the expectation.
"But I don't think it changes anything, I hope it doesn't in some ways, I know probably in some ways it will because that's competitiveness, every driver wants to go out and prove their point, but there's also just responsibility on myself, on Oscar, Andrea, the teams around both of us as drivers to handle these situations correctly.
"In some cases that will mean slightly more rules and then tightening up on some things, because we might be closer together more often, we might race more often. But we've definitely set a good standard last year of how we can work together as a team, how up until Baku there was no priority over one or the other, it was pretty much: 'You're fighting each other, it's up to you'."
Naturally, having two drivers at the sharp end of the grid is a good problem to have - just ask Red Bull - but there have been few examples in the past where things didn't get feisty, or escalated into something much worse, once that equal status was maintained as the title fight headed towards its conclusion. But Stella, the architect of McLaren's racing rules as well as of its technical success, vows the squad will not deviate from the principles it has established last year once it became clear its car was going to be a regular winner.
When asked if things can get spiky between the pair, Stella said he was "looking forward to having this kind of challenge" but still insisted that drivers who don't buy into the team's ethos do not belong in a McLaren F1 car in the first place.
Watch: Why Stella is confident as McLaren launch their F1 2025 season
"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," Stella 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.
"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. 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.
"It's important to say that 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.”
Time will tell if McLaren's rules of engagement were as robust as the team believes, or if they were merely kept intact by the performance difference and ensuing points gap between Norris and Piastri.
But if Piastri has really upped his game in 2025, then McLaren's principles will be stress tested more than they were last year.
