RacingLando Norris clinched the 2025 Formula 1 championship at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, edging Max Verstappen by two points after a season-long intra-team fight with McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri. Even with flashpoints from Monza to Canada, Piastri pushed back on the idea this was a civil war inside McLaren.
McLaren owned the year. Norris and Piastri each won seven races, one fewer than Verstappen, and both arrived in Abu Dhabi still in the hunt. It was McLaren’s fiercest internal duel since Mercedes’ “Silver War” between Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton, and it went the distance. Norris came out on top, Verstappen snatched second, and Piastri slipped to third in the standings.
The tone of the fight changed at Monza. Piastri was instructed to surrender second place to Norris after Norris lost time with a slow pit stop. That appeared to mark a turn in Piastri’s run. He had led the championship in the first half, but after Azerbaijan he made errors or could not repeat his early form, and the slide opened the door for Verstappen to overhaul him for runner-up.
Outside the garage, suspicion built that McLaren favored Norris. The on-track contact between the teammates in Canada, the team’s internal conduct guidelines known as the Papaya Rules, and the Monza team-order episode fed the narrative. The noise never really went away, even as both drivers kept winning races and kept the title alive to the finale.
Piastri has pushed back on the feud talk. “The media play a huge role in F1, whether you want it or not… there were some difficult moments behind closed doors — but it wasn’t as catastrophic or a kind of World War III as some media portray,” Oscar Piastri, McLaren driver, said in an interview on the Quad Lock YouTube channel. He said he can separate what he hears from what he sees inside the team and that the relationship with Norris is not broken.
He also described the balance he tries to keep amid a title chase inside one team. “It’s very important to represent the team and find a balance between your own interests and the team’s. Many of those tough conversations you prefer to keep private,” Piastri, McLaren driver, said in the same interview on the Quad Lock YouTube channel. Piastri said in that interview he remains confident in himself and in McLaren as he looks beyond a season that got away late but still delivered seven wins and a shot at the title on the final day.