‘Strange’ territory: Piastri reshapes his driving as Norris noses ahead in title fight
Oscar Piastri isn’t panicking, but he’s puzzled. After a bruising couple of weeks on low-grip asphalt, the McLaren driver admits he’s had to rethink how he hustles the MCL38 — and quickly — with teammate Lando Norris now a point clear in the championship after a Mexico City masterclass.
Piastri’s Sunday was tidy rather than spectacular: fifth at the flag after starting eighth, while Norris owned the afternoon up front. That’s the headline. The subtext is more intriguing. Since the Dutch Grand Prix — his last win — and a podium in Italy, Piastri’s edge has dulled just as the title picture tightened and Max Verstappen reappeared in the mirrors.
What’s odd is that nothing obvious has changed around him. McLaren called time on development a while back. A post-race look at Piastri’s car in Austin turned up a few quirks, but nothing you’d hang a slump on. So the Australian is looking inward.
“It became obvious after [qualifying] that there were a few things I needed to change pretty majorly in how I was driving,” he told Sky after Mexico. “I’ve just had to drive very differently the last couple of weekends — or, because I’ve not driven differently when I should have.”
That line tells you everything about where his head’s at: the car hasn’t moved, the window has.
Across COTA and the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, the theme was the same — low grip, overheated rubber, and a lap that feels like you’re chasing a bar of soap. Some drivers attack those weekends by leaning into the chaos: drive through the slide, accept the movement, keep the surface temps alive and the lap time ticking. Others try to hold the tyre on a tight leash and get caught out when it won’t listen.
Piastri sounds like he knows which side of that fence he’s been on. “I’ve been driving exactly the same as I have all year,” he said. “These last couple of weekends, the car or the tyres or something has required a different way of driving, and I’ve just not really gone to that.”
For Mexico, then, Sunday doubled as a live-fire test session. Limit the damage, probe the edges, bank some answers for the next one. “If I’ve made some progress, I’ll be happy,” he shrugged. Happy is relative when your garage-mate is spraying champagne.
It’s a small sample size, but a familiar pattern might be brewing: Norris looks ruthless on tracks where adhesion is a suggestion, not a guarantee. He’s been able to “dial into that,” as Piastri put it, with the kind of feel that separates the very good from the very stubborn. Piastri, by contrast, tends to build a lap like a watchmaker, precise and repeatable. That’s won him a lot of Sundays this year. But when the grip falls away, the watch needs a different movement.
Before anyone writes the crisis headline, he’s not. “It’s important to remember for the other 19 races, the way I’ve been driving has been working pretty well,” he said. “It’s more about adding some tools to the toolbox rather than reinventing myself.”
The scoreboard adds some spice. After Zandvoort, Piastri held a 34-point cushion at the top. That’s evaporated to one. Max Verstappen, ever opportunistic, has started to influence the maths again, which means every misstep in papaya now pays double for Red Bull.
There’s also the elemental frustration of uncertainty. Drivers can live with being beaten by an upgrade. They don’t love being beaten by an invisible switch in their own technique. McLaren’s debriefs have reportedly found no smoking gun, so the next fixes are human: brake shapes, throttle maps, how hard you lean on rotation in the mid-corner, where you accept the slide and where you snuff it out. None of that reads well on a timing screen, but it wins or loses you tenths when the track won’t give you anything for free.
The calendar, unhelpfully, keeps the pressure on. Mexico was one of the slipperiest races of the year. Las Vegas, with its polished streets and nighttime temperatures, isn’t far behind on the slipperiness scale. If Piastri’s “tools” are going to arrive, now would be convenient.
The good news? He’s transparent, which usually means he’s already halfway to solving it. The cadence of his post-race comments didn’t feel like a driver lost in the setup labyrinth. It felt like someone who’s recognized the trend, tried a few uncomfortable fixes in real time, and is prepared to keep leaning into them until they stick.
“I tried a few things, trying to change things up a bit,” he said. “Once we analyse if it’s effective or not, that’ll hopefully help see some progress. The car’s not changed in a while now, so it’s nothing to do with the car.”
Call it a strange lull. It’s also the exact kind of crescendo you want from a title fight between teammates: one driver on a heater, the other digging for an answer with a world championship on the line. If Piastri finds the grip — or finds a way to stop caring that it’s not there — this swings back just as quickly as it swung away. If he doesn’t, the kid who looked so serene after Zandvoort may find himself fending off orange on both sides: papaya in-house, and a charging Red Bull in the background.
Either way, Las Vegas is going to tell us plenty about how adaptable this championship really is — and how fast Oscar Piastri can add a new tool to an already sharp set.
