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Can Piastri salvage his F1 championship hopes?

Oscar Piastri had the world championship in his grasp and has cracked under pressure, falling apart at the business end of the season and showing the mental frailty underneath the superficial ice-cool façade.

That’s a narrative that’s built momentum lately, but one that’s as shallow and unsatisfactory as the alternative commentary that portrays Piastri as a passenger who has had the legs cut out from under him by McLaren’s favoritism helping teammate Lando Norris. F1 is complex, the intertwining of the human and the technological making it endlessly fascinating, and the real story of Piastri’s season can’t be so easily simplified. It also means that, despite being 24 points behind with three events left, he’s no busted flush.

But Piastri must reverse his fortunes fast. Heading into the title-deciding triple-header across Las Vegas, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, he’s on a run of six consecutive events where he’s lost points to Norris. That’s resulted in a swing of 59 points against him and in favor of Norris, which is clear evidence of a championship being lost by Piastri even if the reasons for his slump are up for debate. And to unravel what’s really happened, you cannot attribute those difficulties and the resulting points losses a single fundamental cause. Just as piecing together a good race weekend and stringing those together to make a strong season, is always about the details, so too is building a real understanding of what’s gone wrong.

Inevitably, what happened at Monza looms large in the story of Piastri’s season. There, he lost out in qualifying but his underlying pace had been good enough to have had a shot at beating Norris only to be too conservative into the first corner on his final Q3 lap. He wasn’t a threat to Norris on track in the race, but infamously had to cede second place to his teammate after McLaren inverted the pitstop order.

This not only gave Piastri the undercut – according to McLaren, because of the vague threat of Charles Leclerc undercutting him had Norris been the first McLaren driver to stop – but also led to Norris losing time to a fumbled pitstop. Despite Piastri arguing over the radio that a slow pitstop had been agreed to be “part of racing”, McLaren’s argument was that this wasn’t a mistake offering a legitimate gain, but only happened because Norris ceded his right to pit first to help Piastri and the team overall.

While criticized by some as evidence Norris was favored, this actually reflected McLaren’s laudable but misguided and over-engineered philosophy of trying to ensure racing fairness between its two drivers. Piastri said after the race that “the context wasn’t there” when he railed against the order during the race, appearing to accept it, but it’s clear it didn’t sit well with him. Speaking on a recent edition of F1’s Beyond the Grid Podcast, he admitted the irritation at that carried over into the disastrous Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend, where he crashed both in qualifying and on the first lap of the race.

“Obviously the race before that was Monza, which I didn’t feel was a particularly great weekend from my own performance, and there was obviously what happened with the pitstops,” said Piastri. “But then also Baku itself: Friday was tough, things weren’t working, I was overdriving. I wasn’t very happy with how I was driving, and ultimately probably trying to make up for that a little bit on Saturday.

“There were some things in the lead-up that were maybe not the most helpful, and then things that happened on the weekend – we had an engine problem in FP1 that unsettled things a bit, then I was driving not that well, we were on C6 tires that weekend that are now notoriously tricky to handle. There were just a lot of little things that kind of added up. I felt like on Saturday my pace was good but I was just trying a little too hard. That was the worst weekend I’ve ever had in racing, but probably the most useful in some ways.”

Speaking in Brazil about what happened at Baku, he again put it down to a combination of “trying a bit too hard” and, in an oblique nod to Monza, mentioned “there were some other things that maybe crept in”. And while that can partly be put down to McLaren’s overly-meddlesome attempts to ensure racing fairness between the two while protecting the interests of the team in terms of maximizing results, it’s also an admission by Piastri that he couldn’t shut out what happened at Monza. It’s understandable – considering what’s at stake, it’s not difficult to put yourself in his position and have the same concerns – but it’s also a necessity to be able to shut such things out when

in a tight world championship fight. 

However, that particular hangover didn’t continue, even though there’s no doubt that Piastri’s confidence is at an all-time-low for 2025. Singapore is lumped into this sequence of troubled races as he finished fourth behind Norris. However, Piastri was the quicker McLaren driver in qualifying and would have finished ahead had he completed the first lap still ahead. The Turn 3 wheelbanging between him and Norris, caused by Norris clipping the rear of Max Verstappen, became the big talking point of that weekend, but this wasn’t a straightforward case of one McLaren barging the other – simply the downstream consequence of a separate incident. Nonetheless, McLaren made Norris take responsibility by disadvantaging him in qualifying running order for the rest of the season. 

This brings us to the sprints. The first of those was in Austin, and while Piastri crashing out of third in the Interlagos sprint was one of those things after being caught out on a wet kerb that Norris had pulled water onto, his cutback at the first turn at COTA was ill-advised. Norris’s incisive move at Turn 1 ensured he got into the corner first and Piastri ended up trying to cut inside, which on an empty track would be perfectly logical, but was high-risk knowing there were 17 other cars charging into that same corner. The resulting clash with Nico Hulkenberg led to both McLarens retiring. That was Piastri’s misjudgement; one that led to the qualifying order reprisals being dropped.

Piastri points to Baku as his low point, but some of his setbacks elsewhere have not been of his own doing. Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images

Even more significant at Austin was that it was the start of a run of three weekends where Piastri struggled in low-grip conditions. There, he was a step behind Norris, converting that into fifth place. In Mexico, in even lower grip conditions a week later, he was two steps behind and managed fifth again. That was supposed to be that, with the return to Interlagos allowing him a reset. Worryingly, that trend continued thanks to a track that was surprisingly low in grip, with Piastri pointing to the “odd” behavior of the Pirelli tires contributing to that.

And while his sprint crash proved costly, representing an eight-point swing for Norris, he would have finished on the podium and probably in second in the grand prix itself but for being penalized for hitting Kimi Antonelli when he dived up the inside into Turn 1. That booted the Mercedes across the track and into Charles Leclerc, with the 10-second penalty setting Piastri on course for a third-consecutive fifth place.

It was a harsh penalty caused by the one-dimensional racing guidelines given he was squeezed by Kimi Antonelli, so you can’t blame him for feeling hard done by – especially with the memory of what he felt was a harsh penalty costing him victory in the British Grand Prix still raw. Yes, Piastri was tak ing a risk making it three-wide, but really this was a racing incident. 

To make matters worse, Norris has hit a rich vein of form and dominated both the Mexico and Brazil weekends. His high-finesse, feel-based driving style has allowed him to thrive in those conditions where you have to deal with the fact the car is endlessly, if from the outside imperceptibly, sliding. That’s where Piastri has struggled, with his simpler (not intended as a pejorative) driving style with far less overlap of brake and steering not so well-tuned to dealing with it.

He’s talked of the need to add to his driving toolbox and has been frank about his difficulties, but it’s also a reminder that he’s only in his third season up against a driver in his seventh campaign. Norris being on song will have made Piastri’s situation feel even worse, but the fact that Norris’s season so far has been an erratic one, where he has danced spectacularly on the peaks but also often slid off them, means there’s no guarantee that he will be untouchable in the three events to come. 

The story of the past six race weekends for Piastri neither gives him confidence nor guarantees he will continue to struggle. However, the fact there are so many facets to it, no one single straightforward narrative, is itself a reason for at least some optimism. He needs a reset, a good weekend and there’s every chance he will get one. And if he can do that in Las Vegas, and claw back a few points at a track that is the weakest of the three remaining for McLaren, then Qatar, with its fast turns, is the perfect place for him to recapture his stunning form of earlier in the season. Do that and he can go to Abu Dhabi in touch with Norris. Then it’s up to him to nail it at a track where Norris has always gone well. That’s easier said than done, but winning a world championship is meant to be difficult.

Piastri still has the opportunity to provide a twist ending to a title bid that right now appears to have run out of steam. If he can do so, even if he falls short, and deliver a good level of performance relative to Norris then he will at least have proved, once and for all, that the reductive notion he’s choked or been found out is hiding a far more complicated story.