F1 Q&A: Piastri after Norris deal, Antonelli’s Italian GP penalty, Ferrari and Zandvoort

Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli will look to strengthen his grip on the drivers’ championship on home soil at this weekend’s Italian Grand Prix at Monza.

However, the 20-year-old can expect to face the challenge of a resurgent McLaren and, in particular, Lando Norris, who has won the last two grands prix.

And Monza, of course, is also Ferrari’s homeland, although the long straights of the historic circuit may not suit the characteristics of its car.

BBC Sport F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers your final questions ahead of round 13 of the 2026 season.

What does Lando Norris’ new contract extension mean for Oscar Piastri? There is clearly some tension behind the scenes and this season his performance-wise development has clearly slowed. -Juha

There is no doubt that Oscar Piastri has not started this season as well as the last.

In 2025, the Australian seemed on course for much of the year to claim his first world title, until his season unraveled a bit in the final third.

This season, his teammate Lando Norris has won two races and should have won a third in Miami.

Piastri only seemed to be competing for one victory in Hungary, when Norris took his first victory of the year.

After taking the lead when Norris made a mistake on the first lap, there was bad luck when Piastri lost the lead to Norris when he fell behind on the lap of Carlos Sainz’s Williams.

But Piastri acknowledged that it would have been difficult to hold off Norris if he had retained the lead because his pace on hard tires was weak. He became academic when he retired with a broken gearbox.

Although the qualifying stats between them don’t make for pretty reading for Piastri (Norris is 12-4 ahead) on real pace, there’s not much to choose between them on a lap. Norris is just 0.071 seconds faster on average.

It is fair to say, however, that Norris has been comfortably the most convincing rider in the race, hence the gap of 55 points and three places between them in the championship.

There seems to be a few things at play here.

One could be that Piastri has always been strong in high-speed corners. But the number of these with limited grip has been reduced this year because the engines often use them to charge the battery, something that all drivers have complained about. That reduces a potential lead point for Piastri.

Secondly, the cars have less downforce than last year and Piastri feels less comfortable than Norris in low grip conditions.

Finally, there is no doubt that Norris steadily improved his game during the second half of last season to win the world title, and he has continued to raise his level throughout this year. Without a doubt, he is one of the drivers of the season so far.

Team principal Andrea Stella said at the last race in Holland: “Last year we had already seen with Oscar that, from a technical driving point of view, when the car has this low level of grip, as we saw last year, for example in Mexico or in Austin, you need to adapt your way of driving, your way of thinking, your way of driving, your expectations.

“This requires a bit of mental effort, which makes you lose a couple of tenths of a second because you have to process instead of driving on pure instinct because what happens is what you expect.

“So it’s one of those cases where you have to adapt your natural driving style to the demands of the car. So it stays in the driving space and in the space of the technical side of things. I don’t think it has anything to do with any kind of psychological opportunity. This is purely technical.”

Stella points out that the top three teams are very evenly matched in terms of performance, meaning, as he puts it, “when things are not optimized, then you can have a very significant positional loss; it’s very brutal from this point of view.”

Both McLaren and Piastri reject any suggestion that there may be strain on their relationship.

It is a fact, however, that McLaren wanted to sign Max Verstappen this summer, and that if they had done so it is virtually certain that it would have been Piastri who would have been replaced.

That possibility has faded for now, with Verstappen’s new contract with Red Bull. But that contract has performance clauses, and if Red Bull continues to struggle next year, McLaren could well have another chance to sign Verstappen.

For now, Piastri is under contract at least until the end of 2027 and will focus solely on getting back to where he knows he can be.