The “mentally weak” and “too emotional” piece in the McLaren puzzle, Lando Norris has been urged to bring someone like Sebastian Vettel or Nico Rosberg into his camp to help him.

While it wouldn’t be on the same level as having Mark Webber as his manager, as Oscar Piastri does, it could make the difference as the Briton chases a first F1 World Championship.

Can Lando Norris fight back against Oscar Piastri?

Although Norris started the F1 2025 season as the favourite to win McLaren’s first Drivers’ title since 2008, his team-mate Oscar Piastri has usurped him as the one to beat.

After Norris’ early-season win in Australia, which saw him become the first driver apart from Max Verstappen to lead the standings since May 2022, it’s been all Piastri as the Australian banged in four wins in six to lead by 16 points over Norris.

Should he win this weekend at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, he’ll join a list of just 15 drivers – including Michael Schumacher and Verstappen – to win four on the trot. And he’ll be the first McLaren driver since Ayrton Senna in 1991 to achieve the feat.

It’s no surprise that even Verstappen is singing Piastri’s praise.

“People forget a little bit – last year was his second year. Now he’s in his third year, and he’s very solid,” Verstappen told media including PlanetF1.com at last month’s Saudi Arabian GP.

“He’s very calm in his approach, and I like that. It shows on track. He delivers when he has to, barely makes mistakes – and that’s what you need when you want to fight for a championship.”

F1 2025: The season’s winners and losers

👉 The results of the F1 2025 championship

👉 The updated Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championship standings

In sharp contrast, Australian F1 World Champion Alan Jones feels Norris is “quite a weak person” with the Briton openly critical of the errors he has made this season.

He added: “He’s coming out with all this nonsense that he’s got a bit of a mental thing, he’s dwelling on some of the problems he’s had rather than the positives.

“When they start talking all that nonsense, you know you’ve got them.”

It begs the question: who of the two McLaren drivers in the favourite for the F1 2025 World Championship?

But while Mario Andretti, Guenther Steiner and Martin Brundle have warned McLaren will need decide that sooner rather than later, backing one driver ahead of the other, it has been suggested that with the right mental guidance Norris could yet salvage his title challenge.

Dutch journalist Peter Hardenacke told the Backstage Boxengasse podcast: “Do you think that might be a solution for Lando, that he brings someone into the team who has that experience, who has been through it all before?

“This constant battle with himself, these different states of aggregation over the whole weekend, from being on top of his game to being completely depressed, sometimes changing several times in one day.

“Do you think it would be a possibility to get someone? A Sebastian Vettel or a Nico Rosberg who might be on the market?”

To that, former F1 driver Timo Glock replied: “It can certainly help if you have someone with Formula 1 experience, someone with whom you can discuss situations like this.

“But in the end, you’re sitting alone in the car and making decisions. I always have the feeling that even though you have to make decisions in milliseconds at the start of a race or in certain situations, he still thinks about it in his head for too long and doesn’t decide instinctively from his gut what to do.

“That’s what it seems to me that Oscar Piastri does. He’s just in the middle of a situation and makes the right decision most of the time and Lando is always so undecided.

“I don’t know, he’s a bit lost with himself.

“But yes, there is the possibility if you have someone, as I said, an ex-racer who has been through a similar situation, it is always good to talk to them on or between races.

“That might be an option.”

While Norris does not have much backstage support from former drivers, Piastri has former Red Bull driver and F1 race winner Webber as his management team with the Australian guiding his compatriot.

Rosberg has in the past offered to help Norris amidst his mental health struggles as he too sought advice during his title-winning campaign against Lewis Hamilton 2016.

“What was a little bit of a worry,” Rosberg said of Norris in 2023, “because Lando always says himself how he has sometimes challenges with mental health, and I saw some signs of that unfolding again this weekend, because he goes into this spiral of then saying ‘I’m not good enough and I’m just making mistakes, I’ve done a bad job’, and he just repeats that over and over.

“That’s a typical example of a little bit of a mental struggle there.

“And I was going to write [to] him maybe because I studied with psychologists for 10 years, I was really the driver who was most dedicated to improving my mental performance, but also mental wellbeing actually, because it came hand in hand.

“So I spent every two days, I worked two hours with a psychologist. It was more intense than the physical training. It was insane. And it really helped.

“It was a big, big part of me becoming a World Champion.

“So I wanted to write [to] Lando actually, and I wanted to say that one thing is thinking you’re not good enough, but the other thing which you can influence and avoid is what you’re saying then, and if you keep repeating that, in repetition, you can start to believe what you say.

“So it’s important to try and avoid repeating ‘I’m not good enough and I’m making too many mistakes’ over and over and over for the whole weekend.”

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