Piastri pushes back on ‘number two’ tag as he demands full equality with Norris

Under the white glare of the Yas Marina floodlights, with the papaya cars still ticking hot in parc fermé, Oscar Piastri had every excuse to sulk. He’d just watched the world championship slip away by a handful of points, drowned out by the roar for Lando Norris’ coronation. Instead, he put his back against the garage wall, offered a wry smile – and lit the fuse on the next chapter of McLaren’s civil war-that-isn’t.

The Australian finished the season third in the standings, 13 points behind new champion Norris and 11 behind Max Verstappen, despite having led the title race for more days than anyone in 2025. Yet when the lights went out in that Abu Dhabi decider, he raced like a man still writing his own story – sweeping around the outside of Norris at Turn 9, then running an aggressive offset strategy that left him second on the road.

The result may have sealed Norris’ place in history, but it also crystallised the question hanging over McLaren: after this, does Piastri become the de facto ‘number two’?

Piastri’s answer was delivered with the same calm bluntness that has defined his sophomore surge.

“For me, he’s obviously had a great season this year and a deserving champion, but he’s still Lando Norris. It’s not like he’s become Superman.”

— Oscar Piastri, speaking to Sky Sports and Crash.net in Abu Dhabi

He went further, spelling out his expectations for 2026.

“I don’t think things will change. I’m expecting, obviously, full fairness from the team and equality going forward. I don’t have any concern that that will change at all.”

— Oscar Piastri, quoted by ESPN and Express

Those words are more than post-race politeness. They’re a line in the sand after a season in which the idea of Piastri as Norris’ understudy has stalked McLaren like a shadow in the Abu Dhabi night.

In the final flyaway stretch, that narrative was everywhere. Bernie Ecclestone’s claim that McLaren “prefers the English driver Norris” – reposted then hastily deleted from Piastri’s own Instagram, as reported by the Daily Mail – poured petrol on fan theories that strategy calls and pit windows had tilted towards car #4. Monza’s enforced position swap, Hungary’s divergent tyre plans, Singapore’s non-swap after Norris hit Verstappen: each became another red flag to those convinced ‘Papaya Rules’ were a PR slogan, not a reality.

Rivals smelled blood too. As the title run-in tightened, Verstappen openly warned that if Piastri sacrificed his own shot to shield Norris, he could “label himself a number two driver”. McLaren boss Andrea Stella pushed back, insisting before Qatar there was “no reason” to back one driver over the other while the maths kept both alive in the fight, and Piastri himself bristled at the framing.

“I don’t see it as being a number one, number two… I’m trying to help the team as best as I can. It’s not simply number one, number two. We still have the same car, we still have the same opportunities.”

— Oscar Piastri, on team orders and the ‘No.2’ label, speaking to PlanetF1

In other words: he’ll play the team game, but not as anyone’s wingman.

That’s why Abu Dhabi mattered so much beyond the points table. Norris started ahead, with the easier route to clean air. Yet McLaren still allowed Piastri to send it – no DRS-train choreography, no early undercut to pull the champion-elect clear, no coded radio messages about “holding position”. The Australian went on the attack, lived in Norris’ dirty air when he had to, and the team let them race to the chequered flag. For all the noise, this was Papaya Rules in their purest form.

Inside McLaren, the message is that nothing about that philosophy will change just because one side of the garage now wears race suit number one. Zak Brown, who has had to ride out parliamentary questions in Australia about supposed bias, could hardly have been more emphatic.

“Oscar is going to be a world champion. I’m convinced he’s going to be a world champion in a McLaren… To be able to have two number one drivers against all odds, all the noise that we’ve had for so long that it’s impossible to do what we did, which is have two awesome racing drivers that won seven races each.”

— Zak Brown, speaking to ESPN

Strip away the rhetoric and you’re left with a brutal, fascinating equilibrium. McLaren know they can’t sell Piastri on a future built around permanent team orders – not when other top seats may soon be circling a driver who led the championship by 34 points with nine races to go. Equally, they know their best chance of defending both titles in 2026 is to keep this pairing intact, pushing each other to higher peaks, even if that means more awkward debriefs when strategy calls fall one way.

The human story is what makes it combustible. Piastri is the quietly intense assassin in the other car, the one who admits 2025 taught him “a lot of lessons” in dealing with adversity and tricky circuits, as he told ESPN. Norris is the newly crowned champion who freely credits the younger man for forcing him to raise his game. Behind the smiles and the hugs on the Abu Dhabi pit straight, both know that every shared debrief, every split strategy call, is also a battle for the future balance of power inside Woking.

So Piastri plays down the ‘number two’ talk in public, as he must. But listen closely and you can hear the steel under the soft Australian vowels. Norris may have written the headline this year, but the other side of the garage is already drafting the sequel – and he’s made it clear he expects the pen, the paper and the papaya car to be exactly the same.