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Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli will try to tighten his grip on the drivers’ championship on home ground at this weekend’s Italian Grand Prix at Monza.<\/b><\/p>\n
However, the 20-year-old can expect to face a challenge from a resurgent McLaren and in particular Lando Norris, who has won the past two grands prix.<\/p>\n
And Monza is of course also home territory for Ferrari, although the long straights of the historic circuit may not suit the characteristics of their car.<\/p>\n
BBC Sport F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers your latest questions before round 13 of the 2026 season.<\/p>\n
What does Lando Norris’ new contract extension mean for Oscar Piastri? There clearly is some tension behind the scenes and this season his development performance-wise has clearly dipped. – Juha<\/b><\/p>\n
There is no question that Oscar Piastri has not started this season as well as he did last.<\/p>\n
In 2025, the Australian for a large part of the year appeared on course for a first world title, until his season unravelled somewhat in the final third.<\/p>\n
This season, team-mate Lando Norris has won two races – and should have won a third in Miami.<\/p>\n
Piastri has only looked in contention for a victory in Japan, where he was leading and unlucky with the safety car, and Hungary, when Norris took his first win of the year.<\/p>\n
After taking the lead when Norris made an error on the first lap, there was some bad luck involved in Piastri losing the lead to Norris, when he was delayed lapping Carlos Sainz’s Williams.<\/p>\n
But Piastri acknowledged it would have been difficult to hold Norris back if he had retained the lead because his pace on the hard tyres was weak. It became academic when he retired with a broken gearbox.<\/p>\n
Although the qualifying head-to-head statistics between them do not make pleasant reading for Piastri – Norris is 12-4 ahead – on actual pace, there is not a lot to choose between them over one lap. Norris is only faster by 0.071 seconds on average.<\/p>\n
It’s fair to say, though, that Norris has been comfortably the more convincing race performer – hence the 55-point and three-place gap between them in the championship<\/p>\n
There seem to be a few things at issue here.<\/p>\n
One might be that Piastri has always been strong in high-speed corners. But the numbers of these that are grip-limited has reduced this year because the engines are often using them to charge the battery, something about which all drivers have complained. So that reduces a point of potential advantage for Piastri.<\/p>\n
Second, the cars have less downforce than last year, and Piastri is less comfortable than Norris in low-grip conditions.<\/p>\n
Finally, there is no question that Norris upped his game consistently over the course of the second half of last season to win the world title, and has continued to raise his level through this year. Without question, he is one of the drivers of the season so far.<\/p>\n
Team principal Andrea Stella said at the last race in the Netherlands: “Last year, we had seen already with Oscar that, from a technical driving point of view, when the car has this low level of grip, like we saw last year for instance in Mexico or in Austin, he needs to adapt the way he drives, the way he thinks, the driving, his expectations.<\/p>\n
“This requires a bit of mental effort, which gets him to lose a couple of tenths of a second because you sort of have to process rather than drive through pure instinct because what happens is what you expect.<\/p>\n
“So it’s one of those cases in which you have to adapt your natural driving style to the demand of the car. So it stays in the space of driving and in the space of the technical side of things. I don’t think it has anything to do with any psychological kind of opportunity. This is purely technical.”<\/p>\n
Stella points out that the top three teams are very close in terms of performance, which means, as he puts it, “as soon as things are not optimised, then you may have a very significant positional loss – it’s very brutal from this point of view”.<\/p>\n
Both McLaren and Piastri reject any suggestion that there might be tension in their relationship.<\/p>\n
It’s a fact, though, that McLaren wanted to sign Max Verstappen this summer, and that if they had it’s virtually certain it would have been Piastri who was replaced.<\/p>\n
That possibility has receded for now, with Verstappen’s new contract with Red Bull.<\/a> But that contract has performance clauses, and if Red Bull are still struggling next year, it may well be that McLaren have another go for Verstappen.<\/p>\n For now, Piastri is under contract to the end of 2027 at least, and will be focusing only on getting back to where he knows he can be.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n