Opinion: Oscar Piastri’s title bid is getting tight — but he’s built for this
Oscar Piastri has spent most of 2025 making the hard bits look easy. Right now, the easy bits are getting hard.
After Zandvoort, the Australian had a 34-point cushion and seven wins in his pocket — form you don’t sniff at in any era. Two rounds later, and into Austin’s Sprint weekend, the gap to Lando Norris has been trimmed to 22. That’s not panic territory, but it is the sort of margin that makes a driver listen a little harder to the voices in the garage, and the ones in his own head.
Tom Stallard, Piastri’s race engineer and former Olympic rower, knows all about high-wire weekends where one stroke decides everything. He’s been gently tapping the brake on the “this is our shot” narrative, even as he acknowledges it. Speaking to ESPN, Stallard called that mindset “slightly dangerous” because it tempts you into chasing magic. His prescription is blunt: do what you do well. Let the rest look like magic to everyone else.
That’s been the secret sauce of Piastri’s season. The wins have been clinical, the Sunday execution tidy. But the last three events have been messy in a way McLaren had largely avoided in 2025. Monza’s controversial team call — instructing Piastri to hand back P2 to Norris after a slow stop muddled the order — cut the air thin. Baku was worse: a bruising double for the championship leader, with crashes in both qualifying and the race, plus a botched launch that triggered anti-stall. Singapore added a shove at Turn 1 from Norris that the team let ride, cueing a spikier-than-usual Oscar over the radio and 61 laps of holding station.
You don’t need a stopwatch to see why Norris has reeled him in.
Austin’s Sprint qualifying didn’t help. Piastri called his lap “pretty scruffy,” and he’ll line up P3 behind Max Verstappen and Norris for the eight-point Saturday dash. It wasn’t a meltdown — he was quick to downplay it — but when margins are thin, every small slip feels amplified.
That’s the context for Stallard’s words, and why they matter. McLaren are walking a high-tension wire with two title protagonists in the same garage. Internal rules only go so far when the stakes are this large and the window, real or perceived, might be closing. As Stallard put it, there’s an “Olympic-every-four-years kind of feeling” about the campaign, heightened by the coming regulatory reset next season. That sensation can sharpen the senses. It can also gnaw. The trick is to keep it from becoming the story.
It helps that Piastri’s default setting is ice-cold. He’s built his rise on economy of effort — little drama, big result — and his engineer believes he can ride out the added weight. “People say pressure is a privilege,” Stallard said. “It comes with the territory, and we’re in the territory we want to be in.” For a 24-year-old chasing Australia’s first F1 crown since Alan Jones in 1980, that’s both a comfort and a challenge. Others have reached for it — Mark Webber, Daniel Ricciardo — and come away with armfuls of trophies but not the big one. Piastri has put himself closer than anyone from back home in decades.
Is he cracking? The loud voices will say yes. The quieter truth is that title fights get scrappy. Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg didn’t glide to their deciders. Verstappen and Hamilton in 2021 was an elbows-out year that left dents in everybody. What matters now is that Piastri arrests the trend, even if that means banking second places, neutralizing Norris on Saturdays, and resisting the urge to answer every punch with a haymaker.
There’s also a team job here. Monza and Singapore have left scar tissue. However McLaren frame it in public, trust underpins everything when two orange cars are locked in the same championship picture. Clear calls. Consistent enforcement. No surprises. The papaya way only works if both drivers believe in it when the temperature spikes.
The good news for Piastri? His baseline speed hasn’t gone anywhere. When the car’s in the window, he’s been devastating. When it isn’t, he’s usually found a way to limit the damage. Austin offers two chances to steady the ship. If Saturday leans Norris, Sunday’s main event still carries the weight — and that’s where Piastri has made his season pay.
The championship isn’t won in a week, but you can lose a lot of sleep in one. Piastri doesn’t need to conjure anything mystical; he just needs to get back to the thing Stallard keeps preaching. Do your thing. Let it look like magic.
