Oscar Piastri identifies 'key' ingredient to beat Lando Norris in tense McLaren fight

Oscar Piastri believes getting it "all together" over an F1 weekend will be the "key" factor in defeating Lando Norris in the F1 drivers' championship battle. With just 10 of the 24 rounds of the current campaign still to go, the Australian finds himself in a tight contest with his McLaren team-mate, whom he leads by just nine points. Red Bull's Max Verstappen is now a distant third at 97 points adrift, leaving just the Woking-based squad's two drivers to juke it out for the glory of a maiden F1 drivers' title. Much of the intrigue of the fight between the pair is their differing styles and strengths; Norris is generally accepted to be the slightly quicker driver, but has shown himself to be error-prone over the course of the season, whilst Piastri has seldom made mistakes. Last year, when Norris was comfortably the more competitive of the two, one of the most prominent disparities came in qualifying, where the British driver led the 24-year-old 20 to 4 in the head-to-head comparison. However, the eight-time grand prix winner made strides in that area over the winter and leads his team-mate 8-6 (as well as 3-0 in sprint qualifying), in part due to the 25-year-old's aforementioned mistakes. "I've been happy with qualifying this year," Piastri told media, including RacingNews365 , when asked about his progress in that area. "Still not been perfect, but it's certainly been a good improvement from last year." More critical in Piastri's eyes will be weaving together strong weekends that are not compromised by underperformance in one particular aspect, or something going wrong. He does, however, feel he is already piecing rounds together better than last term, when he ended the campaign 82 points behind Norris. "I don't really feel like there's one area that's lacking," Piastri explained. "I felt the same last year; it's just that I never got it all together on the same weekend very often. "This year, I felt much more like that, and it's just going to be about trying to do that every weekend to the end of the year. So that's going to be the key."