There’s one clear winner from F1’s five-race opening stanza of 2025. His name is Oscar Piastri.
The season’s only repeat winner and the only driver to start from the front row more than twice, Piastri finds himself 10 points clear at the top of the championship standings with just over 20 per cent of the campaign completed.
He’s now the undisputed favourite to claim the 2025 drivers title in just his third year as a Formula 1 driver.
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Of course it’s early days yet. A lead of 10 points is nothing with 19 grands prix remaining.
But the Australian will enter the next phase of the season with all the momentum and riding a wave of considerable confidence after having outscored teammate Lando Norris by 33 points since his bruising ninth-place finish at the Australian Grand Prix back in March.
“I’m not that bothered by the fact that I’m leading the championship,” Piastri said. “But I’m proud of the work and the reasons behind why we’re leading the championship.
“Melbourne wasn’t a great start to the year in terms of results, but from the moment I’ve hit the track this season, I felt like I’ve been in a good place.
“Leading the championship is a result of all the hard work we’ve done in the off-season, the hard work I’ve done personally, the hard work the team’s done.
“I’m more proud of all of those things than I am of the fact that I’m leading the championship, because ultimately I want to be leading it after round 24, not round five.”
The impressiveness of Piastri’s position is apparent when put into context.
The 24-year-old is competing in 2025 with just two prior seasons in Formula 1 and 46 grands prix under his belt. That in itself is worth remembering as this year continues.
And to that point, Piastri’s trajectory of improvement since making his debut a little more than two seasons ago as been nothing short of extraordinary.
Let’s consider his key performance indicators of 2024.
Piastri’s vital statistics in 2024
Qualifying result: 5,4 places
Qualifying head to head: 4-20 to Norris
Qualifying differential: 1.8 places behind Norris
Time differential: 0.223 seconds behind Norris
Race result: 5.1 average
Race head to head: 8-16 to Norris
Race differential: 0.8 places behind Norris
There’s a clear message here: Norris had the upper hand throughout the season, dominating Piastri in qualifying and beating him on average in race conditions too.
‘F**** lovely’ – Max FUMES after penalty | 01:41
But now take a look at how Piastri is shaping up by the same metrics so far this season.
Piastri’s vital statistics after five rounds
Qualifying result: 1.8 average
Qualifying head to head: 3-2 to Piastri
Qualifying differential: 2.6 places ahead of Norris
Time differential: 0.127 seconds ahead of Norris
Race result: 3.0 average
Race head to head: 3-2 to Piastri
Race differential: 0.6 places behind Norris
Almost every indicator has been flipped. Norris leads only on race differential thanks to Piastri’s ninth-place finish in Australia dragging down his average.
Piastri is faster over one lap and finishing higher in the races more often.
But what’s most impressive goes beyond the raw statistics.
It’s the fact Piastri is performing during a phase of the season that’s never gone well for him and on tracks at which he’s always struggled.
We mustn’t forget that Piastri was the sport’s highest scoring driver for a long chunk of last season through the European leg of the campaign, when the calendar was full of well-known circuit to any driver who rose through the Europe-centric junior ranks.
But he still struggled at the flyaway rounds at circuits he’d rarely or never raced prior to his debut.
Gains at these races, more than the raw stats, underlines why Piastri’s title lead is so formidable.
Max silent in cooldown after Oscar’s win | 01:24
AUSTRALIAN GRAND PRIX
Qualifying 2024: qualified 6th (Norris 0.257 seconds ahead)
Qualifying 2025: qualified 2nd (Norris 0.084 seconds ahead)
Race 2024: finished 4th (Norris 1 place ahead)
Race 2025: finished 9th (Norris 8 places ahead)
Some drivers derive a performance benefit from their home grands prix, but not Piastri.
Unlike, say, British drivers, who inevitably cut thousands of laps around Silverstone on their way to F1, the temporary Albert Park circuit exists only for the grand prix weekend. When Piastri lined up in Melbourne in his first season, he was the equal least experienced driver on the grid around his home track.
It’s offered him commensurately little joy. Last year Norris smacked him by more than a quarter of a second in qualifying, a gap that closed in the race largely thanks to the car finding its natural level in the field behind the leading Ferrari one-two.
This year, however, was a totally different story. There was almost nothing to split him from Norris over one lap, with both drivers suffering minor errors, and there’s a strong argument to make that Piastri was the strong driver in the race, having closed rapidly onto Norris’s gearbox before being told by pit wall to not overtake.
The sudden arrival or rain saw both McLaren cars slither off the road, but whereas Norris was able to continue with the lead, Piastri was dumped down the order to finish ninth.
But that result shouldn’t detract from what was a very strong performance and an early indicator of how much he improved during the off-season.
Piastri outduels Max to win Saudi GP | 03:22
CHINESE GRAND PRIX
Qualifying 2024: qualified 5th (Norris 0.108 seconds ahead)
Qualifying 2025: qualified 1st (Piastri 0.146 seconds ahead)
Race 2024: finished 8th (Norris 6 places ahead)
Race 2025: finished 1st (Piastri 1 place ahead)
The Shanghai International Circuit was one of Piastri’s worst last season, the track’s first season back on the calendar since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Piastri’s biggest weakness in his first two seasons was managing the sensitive Pirelli tyres, and the unusual partial resurfacing of the circuit last year exacerbated that flaw.
Despite being relatively competitive in qualifying, he was obliterated in the race, losing three places on where he started and finishing 42 seconds behind Norris — and close to a minute off the lead.
This year he was comfortably the lead McLaren, with Shanghai’s unique layout the first to highlight the mismatch between Norris’s driving style and the McLaren car.
But not only did Piastri lead the way internally, he did so externally as well, taking the first pole position of his career and duly converting into a controlled victory to highlight just how much he’d improved year on year.
“I think the performance that he has pulled off during this weekend shows how rapidly he grows, how rapidly he improves,” McLaren principal Andrea Stella told Sky Sports at the time.
“Tyre management is definitely one of the most difficult to get when you are a rookie and enter this balance of pushing, not pushing, saving but not going too slow. It’s a tricky one to make, and now he does it very well.
“But it’s also the technicalities around the driving style. I’ve seen Oscar evolving from a driving points of view, and this is ultimately what makes the difference.
“If you are capable of pulling all these aspects together when it counts and the car is competitive. then you can pull off this sort of performance.”
Norris CRASHES out in Saudi Q3 | 01:19
JAPANESE GRAND PRIX
Qualifying 2024: qualified 6th (Norris 0.271 seconds ahead)
Qualifying 2025: qualified 3rd (Norris 0.032 seconds ahead)
Race 2024: finished 8th (Norris 3 places ahead)
Race 2025: finished 3rd (Norris 1 place ahead)
Suzuka Circuit has been a mixed bag of results for Piastri. He scored his first front-row start and maiden grand prix podium at the track in 2023 but was smashed by Norris in the race, when his problems managing the tyres again came to the fore.
His return in 2024, when the McLaren car was less competitive, was even more difficult, seeing him start down the order and finish even further back, in part after getting himself struck in traffic.
This season, however, featured no similar lack of pace.
He was the quicker McLaren driver in qualifying but suffered for a mistake that put him behind Norris and then also behind a brilliant Verstappen.
With passing so difficult around Suzuka in the current F1 era, he ran third throughout the race with limited opportunities to make up places, but he made clear he had more pace than Norris by running on his gearbox for much of the second stint, though the team opted against swapping him into second to pursue Verstappen.
Result aside, the improvement in pace, consistency and race management were all clear on a day controlled by Verstappen.
Max beats Piastri to pole by 0.01s | 02:20
BAHRAIN GRAND PRIX
Qualifying 2024: qualified 8th (Norris 0.069 seconds ahead)
Qualifying 2025: qualified 1st (Piastri 0.426 seconds ahead)
Race 2024: finished 8th (Norris 2 places ahead)
Race 2025: finished 1st (Piastri 2 places ahead)
Bahrain has been a McLaren bogey circuit for its entire history. Despite the Bahrain sovereign wealth fund having long been a majority owner of the team, McLaren had never won in Sakhir before this season, with a single second place its previous best finish.
Its recent history has been some of its worst. Bahrain’s status as the season opener has seen McLaren debut some badly undercooked cars at the desert track, including in Piastri’s maiden season, when he retired after only 13 laps with an electrical problem.
McLaren problems, more than Piastri’s own struggles, have coloured the Australian’s performances here, but it’s worth noting how far ahead of Norris he was this year.
He didn’t have big deficits to reverse, but his off-season step forward saw him easily blow away his teammate in qualifying and finish comfortably ahead of him in the race.
This was Norris’s most tricky race weekend matching his driving style to the car, but the fact Piastri hasn’t been suffering that same discomfort in identical machinery says just as much.
Piastri drops sarcastic sledge at Sauber | 00:29
SAUDI ARABIAN GRAND PRIX
Qualifying 2024: qualified 5th (Piastri 0.043 seconds ahead)
Qualifying 2025: qualified 2nd (Piastri 0.177 seconds ahead)
Race 2024: finished 4th (Piastri 4 places ahead)
Race 2025: finished 1st (Piastri 3 places ahead)
Saudi Arabia is the exception on the list of season-opening tracks. Unlike the four that came before it this season, Piastri has always performed strongly in Jeddah dating back to his days in the junior formulae. It was the first circuit at which he outqualified and outraced Norris in his rookie season.
Ironically the Australian was arguably the slower of the McLaren drivers, if only fractionally, up until the start of Q3. Norris was favourite to take pole, but his clumsy crash ensured Piastri’s positive intrateam streak continued.
While he had nothing to prove in a general sense, Piastri still made the most of what turned out to be a front-row start, placing himself perfectly on the apex of the first turn to force Verstappen into a race-deciding error.
That made this race meaningful for reasons beyond his upward performance trend. It showed that he had not just the pace but the guile to take the fight to the reigning champion in a wheel-to-wheel battle.
It’s unclear how valuable that could be for the rest of the season, but after five races in which he was the quickest driver, Piastri can approach that question with confidence.