Oscar Piastri’s grip on the world championship cracked under pressure and crumbled late in the season, revealing a mental fragility beneath his icy surface.
It’s a narrative that’s been gaining momentum lately, but it’s as shallow and unsatisfying as alternative commentary that depicts Piastri as a passenger who had his leg cut out from underneath him courtesy of McLaren helping teammate Lando Norris. F1 is complex and the intertwining of humans and technology makes it endlessly fascinating, and the true story of Piastri’s season cannot be easily simplified. It also means he hasn’t beaten Flash despite a 24-point lead with three events remaining.
But Piastri must quickly reverse his fortunes. He has now lost points to Norris in six straight races heading into a title-clinching triple-header in Las Vegas, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. As a result, there was a 59 point difference over him, favoring Norris. This is clear evidence that Piastri lost the championship, even if the reason for his slump is debatable. And to uncover what actually happened, these difficulties and resulting point losses cannot be attributed to a single root cause. Just like piecing together good race weekends and piecing them together to create a strong season, truly understanding what went wrong is always about the details.
Inevitably, what happened at Monza will feature prominently in the story of Piastri’s season. There he lost out in qualifying, but his basic pace was good enough and he had a chance to beat Norris, but he was too cautious in the first corner on the final lap of Q3. Although he was no threat to Norris on the race track, he infamously had to concede second place to his teammate as McLaren reversed the order of their pit stops.
This not only gave Piastri an undercut (according to McLaren, due to the vague threat that Charles Leclerc would undercut him if Norris made his first stop as a McLaren driver), it also led to Norris losing time due to a failed pit stop. Piastri claimed over the radio that the slow pit stop had been agreed as “part of the race”, but McLaren’s argument was that this was not a legitimate mistake and only happened because Norris had waived his right to make an earlier pit stop to help Piastri and the team as a whole.
While some have criticized this as evidence of Norris favoritism, it actually reflects McLaren’s laudable but misguided and over-engineered philosophy of trying to ensure the fairness of the race between its two drivers. Piastri appeared to accept it, saying after the race that he had “no context” for objecting to the position during the race, but it’s clear it didn’t sit well with him. Speaking on the latest edition of F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast, he admitted that his frustration carried over into the disastrous Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend, when he crashed in qualifying and on the first lap of the race.
“Obviously the race before that was Monza, I didn’t think it was a particularly great weekend based on my performance and obviously what happened in the pit stop,” Piastri said. “But so was Baku itself. Friday was tough, things weren’t going well and I was in overdrive. I wasn’t really happy with my driving and maybe I was trying to make up for it a little bit on Saturday in the end.”
“There were a few things that probably didn’t help the most. And then there were the things that happened over the weekend. We had an engine problem in FP1 that made things a bit choppy and then we didn’t drive very well. That weekend we were on C6 tires, which are notoriously difficult to handle. Little things just added up. I had good pace on Saturday, but I felt like I tried a little too hard. It was the worst weekend I’ve ever had.” ”
Speaking in Brazil about what happened in Baku, he again blamed it on “trying a little too hard” and, with a roundabout nod to Monza, said: “Maybe something else crept in.” And while part of this can be attributed to McLaren’s overly meddlesome attempts to ensure the fairness of the race between the two sides while protecting the team’s interests in maximizing results, it also means Piastri has admitted that he was unable to shut out what happened at Monza. That’s understandable – given what’s at stake, it’s not hard to put yourself in his shoes and have the same concerns – but sometimes you also need to be able to shut things out like that. In a fierce world championship battle.
But that hangover didn’t last, even though Piastri’s confidence is undoubtedly at an all-time low heading into 2025. Singapore was lumped into this series of problematic races as it finished fourth behind Norris. However, Piastri was the fastest of the McLaren drivers in qualifying and would have finished higher if he had completed his first lap earlier. The wheel banking between him and Norris at Turn 3, caused by Norris clipping the rear of Max Verstappen, was the big story of the weekend, but it was not a simple case of one McLaren cutting into the other, but simply the downstream result of another incident. Despite this, McLaren held Norris responsible for the disadvantageous qualifying position for the remainder of the season.
Now we’re in the sprint. That first race was in Austin, where Piastri crashed from third place in a sprint at Interlagos when Norris caught a wet curb, but a cutback at the first corner at COTA was ill-advised. A sharp move by Norris in Turn 1 ensured that he entered the corner first, and Piastri ended up trying to cut to the inside, which was perfectly logical on an empty track, but risky considering there were 17 other cars in the same corner. As a result, he collided with Nico Hulkenberg and both McLarens retired. It was Piastri’s wrong decision. As a result, the qualified order retaliation was withdrawn.
Piastri cites Baku as his lowest point, but some of the setbacks elsewhere are not his own fault. Rudy Kaleseborg/Getty Images
More importantly in Austin, it was the start of a three-week run in which Piastri struggled in low-grip conditions. There he fell one step short of Norris, moving into fifth place. A week later in Mexico, he fell two steps behind due to even poorer grip conditions and once again held onto fifth place. That was to be expected, and his return to Interlagos made it possible for him to reset. Worryingly, that trend continued thanks to a track with surprisingly low grip, with Piastri pointing to the “strange” behavior of the Pirelli tires as the cause.
And although his sprint crash was costly, resulting in an eight-point swing for Norris, he would have been on the podium and probably finished second in the Grand Prix itself, but he was penalized for contacting Kimi Antonelli while diving on the inside at turn one. This caused the Mercedes to cross the track and collide with Charles Leclerc, and a 10 second penalty put Piastri on track for fifth place for the third year in a row.
Given that he was squeezed out by Kimi Antonelli, it was a harsh penalty caused by the one-dimensional race guidelines, and you can’t blame him for feeling that he was wronged, especially given that the memory of what he felt was a harsh penalty that robbed him of victory at the British Grand Prix is still fresh. Yes, Piastri took a risk and went three-wide, but in reality this was a racing incident.
To make matters worse, Norris showed plenty of form, winning both weekends in Mexico and Brazil. His high level of finesse and sensory driving style allowed him to succeed, even in situations where he had to deal with the fact that his car would keep slipping endlessly, imperceptibly to the outside. Piastri struggles there, due to his (no disrespect intended) simpler driving style with far less overlap in the brakes and less adjusted steering to cope with it.
He’s talked about the need to expand his driving toolbox and has been candid about his difficulties, but it’s also a reminder that he’s only in his third season competing against a driver in his seventh season. With Norris on song, Piastri’s situation will only get worse, but the fact that Norris has had a erratic season so far, often slipping off the top of the mountain despite some great dances, means there is no guarantee he will be untouchable for the next three tournaments.
For Piastri, the story of the past six race weekends does not give him confidence or guarantee that he will continue to suffer. But there are so many sides to this story, and the very fact that there is no single, simple narrative is reason for at least some optimism. He needs a reset and a good weekend, but there’s a good chance he’ll get that. And if he can do that in Las Vegas and claw back a few points on McLaren’s weakest of the remaining three tracks, the fast-cornering Qatar would be the perfect place for him to recapture his incredible early-season form. Then he can contact Norris and go to Abu Dhabi. Now it’s up to Norris to find success on a track where he has always done well. Easier said than done, but winning a world championship is hard.
Piastri still has a chance to pull off a twist in a title bid that currently appears to be running out of steam. Even if he doesn’t come close to that, if he can do so and perform at a good level compared to Norris, he will have at least proven once and for all that the reductive notion of him being suffocated or found hides a much more complex story.
