1996 F1 World Champion Damon Hill believes that Lando Norris has to make some changes in how he approaches battle or face further defeats.

Norris is now 16 points behind McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri after the first quarter of the F1 2025 season, having been 23 points ahead after the first race – a 39-point swing across five race weekends as the Australian has won four of those five races.

Damon Hill: F1 drivers are only passing through teams

Norris has been with McLaren since his arrival in F1 in 2019 and spent the first few years of his time at Woking learning the ropes while the team was not in a position to win races or challenge for championships.

Having put in the hard yards with McLaren on its journey to becoming winners again, the British driver rose into a championship-challenging position for the first time in 2024.

In a year where McLaren’s MCL38 evolved into the quickest and most versatile car on the grid as Red Bull’s RB20 fell off the boil through the upgrade cycle, Norris became McLaren‘s driver for the championship push against Max Verstappen.

Norris ultimately fell short, having been unable to make a big dent in the championship lead Verstappen opened across the first six races, while teammate Oscar Piastri dutifully fell into a supporting role in the closing stages of the championship.

But, in 2025, it’s Piastri who has hit the ground running with an exemplary run of form to put Norris and Verstappen in the shade.

The Australian, who still showed some signs of inconsistency last year in his second season in F1, appears to have addressed his remaining weaknesses and has now taken a controlling position in the championship.

While McLaren is open about its desire to maintain parity between its drivers – both of whom are similarly aged and similarly successful on similarly long-term deals – the fact Norris has been embedded in the team for longer and has been with them through tougher times will count for nothing when titles are beckoning, believes Hill.

Speaking on the BBC‘s Chequered Flag podcast, Hill cut down the suggestion that Norris had “made McLaren his own” and that Piastri came in and “upset the apple cart”.

“It’s not a home for racing drivers, a race team. He’s put in the graft, he’s been there earlier, before Oscar,” Hill said.

“But the team belongs to the team, and the drivers are passing through; the part they [have], they either work for the team and deliver what the team wants, or they don’t.

“The team might give them a fantastic career coming second for a long time, but that’s not what you want.

“You want to win, and they want a winner, and they’re going to find a winner between the two of them, and they’ll be very happy with Oscar if it’s not Lando. They don’t care.

“So that’s the situation. It doesn’t belong to you just because you’ve been there longer.”

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Damon Hill: A penny needs to drop with Lando Norris in wheel-to-wheel

With Norris having compromised his own race weekends in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia through mistakes in qualifying, his Miami race was spoiled by a Turn 2 battle with Verstappen in which the Dutch driver had a snap of oversteer while pushing through the corner just a fraction ahead of Norris.

Norris took avoiding action and went off track, falling down to sixth, and was further held up in his recovery drive when he passed Verstappen by going outside of the track limits.

With Piastri decisively wrong-footing Verstappen in his own battle with the Red Bull driver, Hill said he believes Norris needs to find greater clinicality in his wheel-to-wheel battles, or Piastri will come out on top.

“I think there’s a penny that needs to drop, I get the sense with him,” he said.

“When you think back to Austria last year, when he was fighting with Max, he kind of put himself in vulnerable positions and he came off worse.

“He makes comments like, ‘I still want to win. I still want to be a nice guy’.

“Well, that’s not about being nice. It’s about being effective. It’s about being clinical in how you deal with someone like Max, he’s not going to give it to you.

“Now he’s got Oscar as well, and Oscar’s racecraft seems to be a little bit more effective against someone like Max; Max has said positive things about Oscar as well, so that doesn’t help.

“So Lando is now in a situation where he’s lost more points to his title rival in effect, which is his teammate, Oscar.

“Oscar is inching ahead, and it’s a long way to go yet, and it’s not over and done, but you get the sense that in a battle, in a wheel-to-wheel battle, Oscar will come out ahead in a wheel-to-wheel race over Lando.

“So either he works out what to do about that, or he may suffer more defeats or losses like that.”

Evaluating the costly Turn 2 moment with Verstappen after the chequered flag in Miami, Norris was open about how he felt he hadn’t done as good a job as Piastri.

“If I don’t go for it, people complain. If I go for it, people complain. So, you can’t win,” he said.

“But it’s the way it is with Max – it’s crash or don’t pass. Unless you get it really right and you put him in the perfect position, then you can just about get there. But I paid the price for not doing a good enough job today. But I’m still happy with second.

“He’s fighting hard, but it’s up to him to do that. He’s ruining his own race. He’s not racing very smart. We probably could have finished 1-2 today, and he didn’t because of that. So yeah, he’s fighting, that is always expected, but that’s what it is.”

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