Piastri calls Baku ‘messy’ after rare double error as Verstappen closes the gap
Oscar Piastri doesn’t do ragged weekends. That’s been one of the defining traits of his rise: clean, clinical, quietly relentless. Baku, though, bit him hard.
The McLaren driver crashed in qualifying, copped a jump-start penalty, and then slid into the Turn 5 barriers on Lap 1. Title leads don’t often survive afternoons like that, and while he remains in front, the advantage is thinner. Max Verstappen’s back-to-back wins have cut the gap to 69 points and, more importantly for Red Bull, re-opened a championship door that looked like it had been bricked up by Woking months ago.
“I’m not going to rule him out,” Piastri said of Verstappen’s threat. “But I’m honestly not too concerned with that. I’m just trying to bounce back from this weekend and put in the best performances that I can. I know that if I get back to where I know I can be, then I’ll be more than okay.”
It was the first time this season that Piastri sounded annoyed with himself rather than the machinery or the margins. The tone fit the day. His qualifying shunt left him marooned in ninth, and the jump-start — a lapse you don’t associate with him — brought a five‑second penalty before he’d even had time to settle in. The race then ended almost as soon as it began, a lock-up on the dusty off-line sending the championship leader clattering into the wall.
“I just locked up,” he said. “I think just ultimately misjudging the grip level. I probably lost that from dirty air, but I know better than that to expect the lack of grip. So I’m certainly not blaming it on anything else. It was two simple errors on my behalf that cost today.”
Piastri’s body of work in F1 has been built on calm execution. Baku was the outlier — messy, as he put it, in every phase. “This weekend’s felt like any other weekend, just unfortunately, there’s been far too many mistakes from start to finish. Every single session has been messy.”
McLaren’s advantage for much of the year had the destination of the drivers’ title looking like a private argument between their two orange cars. That buffer has been punctured. Verstappen’s haul over the past fortnight doesn’t yet reframe the entire season, but it shifts the mood. Red Bull smell opportunity; McLaren know they’ve got a proper fight on their hands again.
The small mercy for Piastri? Lando Norris didn’t cash out on the chaos. Six points was a light return from the other side of the garage, meaning the Australian’s damage was contained to pride more than points. “Obviously, you’re never going to feel amazing after a weekend like this,” Piastri said. “But ultimately, I felt like the pace has still been good this weekend, and I think it’s rare that I have so many executional errors. They are costly errors, but things that could be very, very easily rectified.”
That last line will soothe McLaren as much as it steels Piastri. This wasn’t a structural wobble. No mysterious setup rabbit holes, no gremlins. Just mistakes — uncharacteristic, yes, but simple to park. If you’re the team boss, you take that over an inexplicable lack of pace seven days a week.
Baku does that to drivers. The circuit flatters the brave but exposes the misjudged. Turn 5 is unforgiving when you arrive a fraction wide and a touch optimistic. Piastri paid the price; Verstappen, as he tends to, made no such errors and banked another win that keeps the reigning champion very much in the conversation.
The bigger picture hasn’t flipped. Piastri still owns the lead, and he’s still been the most consistently sharp operator of 2025. But the contours of the title fight have changed. The margin for sloppiness isn’t there anymore, not with Verstappen squeezing every point and Red Bull sensing a late-season swing.
“Bounce back” was the phrase Piastri leaned on, and that will be the brief. Strip out the noise, find the rhythm, get back to the metronome laps that put him in this position. The speed is there. The calm usually is, too. Baku, bizarrely, gave us the first look at what happens when it isn’t.
Two simple errors, he said. They won’t need a complicated fix. But they have blown just enough warm air into a title fight that was starting to cool. That’s good news for the rest of us — and a sharp reminder for the man still wearing the target.
