F1 Focus: Norris flies and Stroll flounders on return to Shanghai

The Chinese Grand Prix is back, and given that it's always been one of my favourite races as someone who grew with it in the 2000s, I couldn't be happier.

As is proving to be the case more often than not these days though, the most interesting stories were found not at the front, where Max Verstappen cruised to victory, but behind the Dutchman.

Here are my main takeaways from the weekend.

Norris makes it clear that he is McLaren's main man

Lando Norris headed into this season in danger of falling into the shadow of teammate Oscar Piastri, who many consider to be the sport's biggest talent since Verstappen, but he made it abundantly clear in China that he remains McLaren's lead driver and one of the grid's best.

The lap he produced in wet conditions to claim pole position for the sprint race was one of the best I've seen this season, so good that he took pole by the biggest margin in a decade, and while he tried too hard to hold on to the lead at the start of the sprint and ruined that race for himself as a result, he more than made up for it on Sunday, beating Sergio Perez to P2 with ease despite having a much slower car.

Choosing to sign a new long-term deal with McLaren was a risk given many expected Piastri to quickly establish himself as the team's main man, but it's looking like a good call now with Norris well on track to win the intra-team battle between the two for the second year in a row. In the same way that Red Bull have become Verstappen's team, McLaren are becoming his.

Being Verstappen's number-two, as he reportedly had the chance to do, may have given him that long-awaited first win sooner, but with him getting the better of Piastri and the British team developing well, his chances of becoming a world champion are higher where he is.

He's earned the full support of his team, and if they can give him a top car too, there really aren't many drivers I wouldn't back him to beat - Verstappen, Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton maybe, but I'd fancy his chances against anybody else.

Hamilton quietens claims of a Ferrari mistake

With Hamilton having a fairly mediocre start to the season and Carlos Sainz dazzling, many had started to wonder whether Ferrari made a mistake in choosing to replace the latter with the former for 2025 and beyond, but the seven-time world champion quietened such talk in China.

As he's done so often over the years, the Mercedes man mastered wet conditions to qualify in second for the sprint race and then made the perfect start to take the lead. He was powerless to resist Verstappen after that but didn't put a foot wrong on his way to second before climbing from 18th to ninth in the main race.

Qualifying in 18th in the first place obviously isn't ideal, but I don't think that result says anything about Hamilton's pace given he and the team decided to experiment with his car's setup for the session. When he had a setup he was comfortable with in Shanghai, he looked as fast as ever and showed that he hasn't lost any ability when it comes to wheel-to-wheel racing.

Given that Sainz is effectively driving to save his career whereas Hamilton already has a seat secured for next season and has nothing significant to fight for in this one, it's inevitable that the Spaniard will be pushing harder than the Brit this year and may therefore look better at times. However, we'd do well not to read too much into that.

Once he slips on those red overalls and gets started on the final project of his career, perhaps the biggest of them all - fighting to claim a record-breaking eighth title and ending Ferrari's drought - expect Hamilton to be as good as anyone.

Aston Martin need to look past Lance to advance

Aston Martin owner Lawrence Stroll loves to give a good soundbite - especially to Netlfix - about how he's in Formula 1 to win titles and how, with his ambition and resources, nobody can stop him from doing so. However, it's hard to take him seriously when he refuses to sign a top number-two driver because the current one is his son.

Lance's poor start to the season hit a new low in Shanghai when, not paying attention to what was happening ahead of him under the Safety Car, he crashed into the back of Daniel Ricciardo, ending the Aussie's race. It was a huge mistake, and the Canadian's reaction to it was even worse, with him refusing to admit that he was at fault, instead calling Ricciardo an "idiot" and his deserved penalty "stupid".

Would he have made such a sloppy error and given such an unprofessional response if he didn't have the luxury of being certain that he'd keep his job regardless? I very much doubt it. For a long time now, he's been driving and behaving like a man with nothing at stake. Even if he was fighting to keep his place on the grid though, I still don't think he'd be good enough to help his dad win races and titles regardless of how good a car he was given.

With Alonso agreeing to stay put for the foreseeable future and Honda becoming their engine supplier, the team are in good shape in every other area, but their ceiling will always be too low for their owner's ambitions if he insists on only having one world-class driver purely out of sentiment and refuses to consider the likes of Sainz, Nico Hulkenberg and Pierre Gasly, all of whom would improve the team hugely and could be fairly easy to obtain.

“We know that Aston Martin is Lance’s home. We know that and the whole project has always been around him," said team principal Mike Krack ahead of the weekend, and as long as that's the case, it's highly unlikely to ever be a winning project.