Do the opposing mindsets of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri signify strength or weakness?

Poker players have a word for Lando Norris’s response to adversity: “leaky”. In a game of bluff and counter-bluff, allowing emotions to manifest outwardly is certainly a disadvantage and a weakness.

Is it also the case in a Formula 1 driver? There are those who would argue so, saying this is a brutal dog-eat-dog world of split-second decisions determined by self-interest, where the protagonists take risks which require supreme faith in their own abilities – no place for (ghastly word) ‘snowflakes’.

So it has become fashionable to sneer at Norris’s habitual self-flagellation. The ranks of critics who suggested he ‘choked’ towards the end of last season have swelled, and this constituency interprets his glum demeanour, unfiltered self-criticism and fidgety body language after recent grands prix as tantamount to capitulation in the world championship.

“I make life pretty tough for myself,” he said after last weekend’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, the second race in a row where mistakes have cost him the championship lead. More significant to those scrutinising his mindset were Norris’s slumped shoulders and kicked-puppy diction.

While Norris is an outlier in a world where insecurities are generally concealed, his McLaren team-mate occupies a space at the opposite end of the F1 driver paradigm. Oscar Piastri is so manifestly laid back that sometimes you feel you ought to check his pulse.

“People forget this quickly, but last year was only his second season, and now it’s his third – he’s very solid, very calm in his approach. I like that,” said Max Verstappen of Piastri after the Saudi race.

“You can see it on track, too: he delivers when he has to, makes hardly any mistakes – and that’s what you need when you want to fight for the title.”

We will set aside for now the extent to which this was gamesmanship on Max’s part, sharpening his psychological edge over Lando. Oscar’s poker face is, to an extent, a carefully maintained construct – the way he sees it, he needs to channel his energy in a particular way to ensure his own peak performance…

The contrast between the two McLaren drivers is fascinating and a subject to which interviewers are repeatedly drawn, most recently in the run-up to the Saudi race where a German journalist asked Piastri if he had ever been emotional in the cockpit.

“There have been a couple of times through my career,” he replied, “and, yeah, I think when they’re negative emotions it does have a negative impact so that’s why I try… it comes somewhat naturally, being calm and trying to stay relaxed, but there’s a lot of conscious effort on that as well.

“There’s also positive emotions – after China, if you’d had a camera on me and you could see my face, I was pretty damn excited.

“There’s probably more that you don’t see under the helmet – but for me, that’s just how I approach it.”

The contrast between Piastri’s response to his spin in Melbourne and Norris’s to his various misfortunes this season is stark. But does it really signify the binary and situation of strength and weakness?

There is an element of nurture behind the tough-guy masks on show in the current F1 paddock. Verstappen, famously, was dumped on the roadside by his father after losing a kart race.

Even those who champion schools of hard knocks might admit, even sotto voce, that there is little to celebrate about this.

Piastri is managed by Mark Webber, who had to take side jobs delivering pizzas and working as a woodcutter when his own racing career wavered for lack of finance in the late 1990s.

No wallflower, he: during his driving career Webber was well-known for moving his belongings into his team-mates’ heads and taking up residence rent-free. As Nico Rosberg’s Williams team-mate he soon had more or less the entire team referring to the increasingly infuriated occupant of the other garage as “Britney”.

Little wonder Max, as a postscript to his praise of Oscar, cited Webber as a positive influence.

“I think having Mark by his side helps him a lot,” said the world champion. “That’s great, because people learn from their own careers – that’s what I had with my dad. And now Mark is guiding Oscar.”

Confidence is naturally a performance prerequisite for any racing driver. But it’s perhaps mistaken to read Norris’s heart-on-sleeve moments as a sign of crumbling confidence.

“I want to be pole, I want to win, I want to be perfect,” he told Tom Clarkson on F1’s official podcast this week, “and I think I need to accept a little bit more that I’m not going to be perfect, and I’m making mistakes because I’m trying to be perfect, rather than the other way around.”

Ayrton Senna’s faith in himself bordered on messianic, and yet even he – according to those close to him – later came to recognise that taking Alain Prost out at the beginning of the 1990 Japanese Grand Prix had crossed the boundaries of what was acceptable.

Seasoned poker players might look at that brazen and outrageous act, along with some of Verstappen’s actions under duress, as manifestations of ‘tilt’ – where, regardless of facial expression at the time, frustration prompts sub-optimal judgements.

It would be a rare elite sportsperson who doesn’t have demons. Most just save them for their autobiographies.