Ahead of the race in Japan, Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko publicly defended his team’s decision to dump New Zealand’s Liam Lawson from their main team and replace him with Japanese racer Yuki Tsunoda. But, writes Tom Cary in London’s Telegraph, Marko’s also taken the chance to heap some pressure on pace-setting McLaren duo Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri. “While there is justifiable intrigue within the F1 community to see how Red Bull’s decision pans out in Suzuka this weekend, it was something Marko said almost as an aside during one of his many interviews, which was potentially of more significance as far as this year’s title race is concerned,” Cary writes. The Telegraph quoted Marko as saying of the battle for the title – in which Verstappen trails Norris by eight points: “With an eight-point deficit after two races, nothing has really happened yet. “Aside from the fact that Norris and [Oscar] Piastri will hopefully continue to steal points from each other for some time, a truly Verstappen-friendly track is coming up...” Cary writes that “in China, Piastri was clearly the more comfortable of the two McLaren drivers, finishing second in the sprint and winning the feature race. “Piastri’s form raises a fascinating question as we head to one of the fastest and most entertaining circuits on the calendar – the Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka – if McLaren maintain their mechanical advantage over their rivals, which of their two drivers is favourite to win the title? “The consensus within F1 up until now has generally been that Norris, 25, has fractionally more outright pace than Piastri, while the 23-year-old Australian is perhaps the more composed of the two. Is that fair? And if so, which of them is the more likely to improve on his weakness? Norris his mentality or Piastri his pace?”