Should Piastri leave McLaren?

[Nitrodaze]

It was a year of two good drivers making the best of a great car, not a driver taking the car to potential that nobody else could do.

I've never considered it a given that any team would favor one driver at the season 1/2 way point. Some have done it, some have not. .

A huge majority of the times teams that have not supported the driver in the lead after the summer break, found that the decision lead to them losing the driver's championship. The 2007 season comes to mind, Hamilton was leading Alonso, but they let them race to the end of the season and lost the driver's championship to Raikonnen by one point. The 2024 season is another example. If McLaren had put their support behind Norris, he may have won the 2024 driver's title. I am sure if you look hard, you would find a few others. Hence, McLaren was lucky that Redbull took their time getting their act together. If they had done it by one race earlier, there is a high chance Verstappen may have won it.

On the McLaren drivers, l think Piastri has surpassed Norris this season. There is some argument that the car at the start of the season favoured Piastri's driving style. But the car that started the season appears to be relatively faster than the car that finished the season.

I say relatively to mean the relative gap of the McLaren to the nearest rival was larger in the Piastri car than in the Norris car. You could say that this is because the rivals have caught up in development. What we cannot say is that McLaren stopped development, which is why they caught up. They did not as they were modifying the car to suit Norris.

Which makes me wonder, what was the cost of spending time to modify the car for Norris to the McLaren 2026 project time? Surely, they must have pulled engineers from that project to do the modification. Not unless they plan to take that suspension into the 2026 car.