If Lando Norris becomes the 2025 Formula 1 world champion, he will have pulled off a rare, long-shot turnaround.
Being 34 points behind with nine races remaining, including this weekend’s Italian Grand Prix, means Norris only has a narrow path to beating McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri. Under the current points system, only one driver has come back from a worse position at this stage of the season - Sebastian Vettel, in 2012.
Norris could draw hope from the most dramatic of late comebacks in this century, like Vettel being 15 points down going into the 2010 finale, or Kimi Raikkonen’s famous 2007 triumph under the old points system. But they are the exceptions that prove the rule. To be world champion Norris needs an extremely rare swing in his favour and there are two things working against him to achieve that.
The first is that this is a two-horse race. Norris cannot really rely on others regularly taking points off Piastri or making life difficult for his team-mate. And the second is that they are in equal machinery - Norris doesn’t have the advantage of, say, Vettel in 2012 with his rival in a lesser car.
That said, the maths are in Norris’s favour. Nine races to go, three sprints, and 249 points up for grabs - if you’re an optimist, there are loads of opportunities for Norris to get back ahead by the final lap in Abu Dhabi.
The outcome he can control
Plotting a path to victory is, therefore quite simple on paper. In fact, Norris can plot three.
The first is unlikely: Norris can win at least seven of the nine remaining races. If he does that, and avoids losing ground across the three sprints, then even if Piastri wins the other two grands prix, Norris will be world champion (as long as he is second to Piastri in those two races Piastri wins).
That’s the ‘simplest’ in terms of Norris controlling his own destiny. It’s a lot harder to execute given how good Piastri has been this year, even at tracks Norris has previously had a clear advantage. And there’s nothing in the evidence of the season so far to suggest Norris will suddenly start winning a lot more than Piastri, when Piastri is 7-5 up on victories so far in 2025 and has led twice as many kilometres as Norris.
“I've just to be on top in more qualis, I've got to be a bit more on it and sharp with various things here and there, the racing decisions, strategy,” says Norris.
“I can't do a lot more because I feel like I'm doing already everything I can. It's not this [retirement] was a trigger and now I can suddenly start doing more. I've been pretty happy with a lot of my performances.
“We're just talking very small margins here and there that can make big differences.”
Realistically, Norris’s best chances are two different routes that both require outside assistance.
If he wins more than Piastri does until the end of the year, Norris puts Piastri in a position where he cannot afford to slip up, but that’s still going to be out of Norris’s hands. Especially as McLaren’s improved its car to the point one-two finishes are much more likely than not.
Six of the last seven races should have been one-twos, so even Piastri’s weaker days will probably stem the loss to Norris. To try to put what that means in Norris title terms, Val Khorounzhiy crunched some numbers...
Only a 15% chance in a straight fight?
Val Khorounzhiy
Let's say Norris and Piastri are exactly evenly matched from this point on in the season. This is not true - you will know as much if you've followed the season - but it's one of a few suppositions we have to make to come up with this very basic, just-for-example's-sake, model.
The other assumptions are:
- Every upcoming result, in terms of points swing, will be an exact copy or mirror (in favour of the other driver), of one of the previous 15 grand prix results (or one of the previous three sprints).
- Each of those results and their mirror results has an equal chance of occurring (so 1/30 and 1/6 respectively) for each of the remaining races, independently of the previous outcome, so there's no extra randomness inherent in racing - nor is the fact that the McLaren has clearly got more dominant over the season accounted for.
Now let's run that a few thousand times. The outcome, in this - I cannot stress this enough - extremely simplistic model, is a Norris title around 15% of the time. A bit better than one in seven, if you will.
That's not fantastic. But, if the rest of the season is all McLaren 1-2s instead, and each 1-2 is a 50/50 shot, Norris's chance at the title in that case is a crisp 4%.
A third swing of 2025 needed
Piastri is not about to start gifting Norris races either, as he has cited the experience of narrowly getting a junior championship over the line (the 2019 Formula Renault Eurocup) as an example of nearly letting a similar lead slip.
So Piastri knows, even if it wasn’t at this level, that nothing can be taken for granted. His intention is to maintain the form that means he has finished off the podium just once in the last 14 races.
The race before that run started, though, was Australia - where Piastri was ninth. Before Norris’s Zandvoort retirement, that was the biggest swing between the two drivers all season. This is Norris’s best chance, really - something happening to Piastri while Norris wins to wipe away a massive chunk of points in one go.
It has now happened twice in 15 races, once to each driver. It could happen again: poor reliability, unpredictable weather, a mistake from a rival - 34 points is a big margin in a straight fight but still small enough that it would instantly become a very fragile lead if just one race goes badly awry.
For now, though, Norris prefers not to think in such terms, preferring instead to view it simply that Piastri will be a deserving world champion if he wins, and that Norris can still control his own destiny even if the odds are not in his favour.
“I don't wish it [something bad to happen to Piastri], I just wish that I could find out that last little bit that…I can still win the championship without anything happening and that's the way I wish to do it,” Norris says.
“It would certainly make my life easier if there were more drivers in between every now and then. The thing is, we're so dominant as a team, that almost makes my life harder. That's probably the most frustrating part of it all.
“Otherwise, it's still to an effect, ‘may the best win’. And if that's the case at the end of the season, then I'll respect that.”
Featured photo credit: Daniele Roversi
