Can Piastri save his F1 championship hopes? | RACER

With the World Championship in his grasp, Oscar Piastri has succumbed to the pressure, falling apart at the business end of the season and showing the mental weakness beneath the superficial, icy facade.

That’s a narrative that has gained momentum recently, but is just as shallow and unsatisfactory as the alternative commentary that portrays Piastri as a passenger who has had his legs cut out from under him by McLaren’s cronyism that helped teammate Lando Norris. F1 is complex, the interweaving of the human and the technological makes it endlessly fascinating, and the real story of Piastri’s season cannot be so easily simplified. It also means that despite being 24 points behind with three events to go, he doesn’t have a busted flush.

But Piastri must quickly reverse his fortunes. Heading into the title-deciding triple-header through Las Vegas, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, he is on a run of six consecutive events in which he has lost points to Norris. That has resulted in a 59-point win against him and in favor of Norris, which is clear evidence that Piastri has lost a championship, even if the reasons for his slump are up for debate. And to unravel what really happened, you can’t attribute those difficulties and the resulting points losses to a single fundamental cause. Just as putting together a good race weekend and stringing it together to create a strong season is always about the details, so too is building a real understanding of what went wrong.

Inevitably, what happened in Monza plays a major role in the story of Piastri’s season. There he lost in qualifying, but his underlying pace was good enough to have had a chance to beat Norris, but he was too conservative in the first corner of his final Q3 lap. He posed no threat to Norris on track during the race, but infamously had to cede second place to his teammate after McLaren reversed the pit stop order.

This not only earned Piastri the undercut – according to McLaren, due to the vague threat that Charles Leclerc would undercut him if Norris had been the first McLaren driver to retire – but also led to Norris losing time due to an awkward pit stop. Despite Piastri arguing on the radio that a slow pit stop had been agreed as ‘part of the racing’, McLaren’s argument was that this was not a mistake that resulted in a legitimate win, but only happened because Norris had given up his right to pit first to help Piastri and the team in general.

Although this was criticized by some as evidence that Norris was favored, this in fact reflected McLaren’s commendable but misguided and overdeveloped philosophy of trying to ensure fair racing between the two drivers. Piastri said after the race that “the context wasn’t there” when he railed against the order during the race and seemed to accept it, but it’s clear he didn’t like it. Speaking on a recent edition of F1’s Beyond the Grid Podcast, he admitted the irritation over this carried over into the disastrous Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend, where he crashed in both qualifying and on the first lap of the race.

“The race before that was obviously Monza, which given my own performance I didn’t feel like it was a particularly great weekend, and there was obviously what happened with the pit stops,” Piastri said. But then also Baku itself: Friday was tough, it didn’t work, I drove too fast. I wasn’t very happy with how I rode and probably tried to make up for that a bit on Saturday.

“There were a few things in the run-up that maybe weren’t the most helpful, and then things happened over the weekend. We had an engine problem in FP1 which messed things up a bit, then I wasn’t riding that well, we were on C6 tires that weekend which are notoriously difficult to handle now. There were just a lot of little things that added up. I felt like my pace on Saturday was good but I just tried a bit 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 in Baku, he again put it down to a combination of “trying a little too hard” and, in an oblique nod to Monza, said “there were a number of other things that might have crept in”. And while that can partly be attributed to McLaren’s overly meddlesome attempts to ensure fair racing between the two while protecting the team’s interests in terms of maximizing results, it is also an admission from Piastri that he could not rule out what happened at Monza. It’s understandable – when you consider what’s at stake, it’s not hard to put yourself in his position and have the same concerns – but it’s also a necessity to be able to shut out such things when in a tight fight for the world championship.

However, that particular hangover did not last, even though there is no doubt that Piastri’s confidence for 2025 is at an all-time low. Singapore is lumped together in this series of difficult races as he finished fourth behind Norris. However, Piastri was the faster McLaren driver in qualifying and would have finished in the lead had he still led the first lap. 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 was no simple case of one McLaren charging the other – simply the downstream consequence of a separate incident. Nevertheless, McLaren made sure that Norris took responsibility by disadvantaging him in qualifying for the rest of the season.

This brings us to the sprints. The first of these was in Austin, and while Piastri crashing third in the Interlagos sprint was one of those things after being caught on a wet curb that Norris had drawn water on, his cutback at the first corner at COTA was ill-advised. Norris’s sharp move into Turn 1 put him first into the corner and Piastri eventually tried to cut inside, which would make perfect sense on an empty track but carried great risk knowing that seventeen other cars were barreling into that same corner. The resulting clash with Nico Hulkenberg led to both McLarens being retired. That was Piastri’s misjudgment; one that resulted in the retaliation for the qualifying order being dropped.

Even more importantly in Austin, it was the start of a three-weekend run where Piastri struggled in low-grip conditions. There he was one step behind Norris and converted that into fifth place. In Mexico a week later, under even lower grip conditions, he was two steps behind and managed to finish fifth again. That should have been the case, with the return to Interlagos allowing him a reset. Worryingly, that trend continued thanks to a track with surprisingly little grip, with Piastri pointing to the ‘strange’ behavior of the Pirelli tires as contributing to this.

And while his sprint crash proved costly, meaning an eight-point swing for Norris, he would have finished on the podium and probably second in the Grand Prix itself, had he not been penalized for hitting Kimi Antonelli as he dived into the inside of Turn 1. That sent the Mercedes across the track and into Charles Leclerc, with the 10-second penalty putting Piastri on course for a third consecutive fifth place.

It was a heavy penalty caused by the one-dimensional racing guidelines as he was pressured by Kimi Antonelli, so you can’t blame him for feeling badly affected – especially with the memory of what he felt was a heavy penalty that cost him victory in the British Grand Prix still raw. Yes, Piastri took a risk by running three wide, but in reality this was a racing incident.

To make matters worse, Norris has hit a rich run of form, dominating both the weekends in Mexico and Brazil. Its highly refined, feel-based driving style has allowed it to thrive in those conditions where you have to deal with the car sliding endlessly, albeit imperceptibly from the outside. That’s where Piastri has struggled, with his simpler (not pejorative) driving style with much less overlap of braking and steering, which wasn’t as well-tuned to handling it.

He has spoken about the need to expand his driving toolbox and has been open about his struggles, but it is also a reminder that he is only in his third season against a driver in his seventh season. The fact that Norris was on track will have made Piastri’s situation even worse, but the fact that Norris’s season so far has been an erratic one, in which he has danced spectacularly on the tops but also often slipped off them, means that there is no guarantee that he will be untouchable in the three upcoming events.

The story of the past six race weekends for Piastri does not give him confidence or guarantee that he will continue to struggle. The fact that there are so many facets to it and that there is not one clear-cut story is in itself a reason for at least some optimism. He needs a reset, a good weekend and there’s a good chance he’ll get one. And if he can do that in Las Vegas and regain a few points at a track that is the weakest of the three remaining for McLaren, then Qatar, with its fast corners, is the perfect place for him to recapture his stunning form from earlier in the season. Do that and he can go to Abu Dhabi in contact with Norris. Then it is up to him to do it on a circuit where Norris has always done well. That’s easier said than done, but winning a world championship is difficult.

Piastri still has the opportunity to put a twist on a title bid that currently appears to be running out of steam. If he can do that, even if he falls short, and deliver a good level of performance compared to Norris, then he will at least have proven once and for all that the reductive idea that he was stifled or discovered hides a much more complicated story.