Plastri and Norris are opposites, who'll take the title?

McLaren has finally produced a car capable of winning a championship but has a driver pairing in Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris that goes about their craft in very different ways.

- NATALIE PINKHAM

Question is, who's more likely to take their maiden drivers’ title?

Oscar Piastri - the cerebral assassin. He races like he’s solving a complex puzzle at 200mph. Methodical, calm and precise, he makes very few mistakes. Andrea Stella’s described him as having “no noise” in his head, clinical from lights out to chequered flag.

He neither celebrates victory nor laments defeat. His mum recounts a story where she and Oscar were cycling, and she went over the handlebars. He was wearing a heart rate monitor and when they got home, they looked at the reading — it shot up when he saw the crash. “So you do have a heart,” she said. “You just rarely show it!”