Guenther Steiner doesn’t do euphemisms, and Mexico City got the full Steiner treatment. The former Haas boss took aim at Oscar Piastri’s weekend and, by extension, his title credentials, saying bluntly the Australian’s performance was “not good enough” to become world champion.
It was a pointed line delivered at a delicate moment for McLaren. The team’s title fight has shifted back in Lando Norris’s direction after Mexico, reversing a season-long tug of war that Piastri had largely controlled from spring through early summer. Piastri’s qualifying off-day and P5 finish at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez — from P7 on the grid after Carlos Sainz’s penalty — was tidy damage limitation. But with Norris winning on the same afternoon, tidy wasn’t enough.
“He’s struggling now, and I don’t know what exactly is happening,” Steiner told reporters. “One of the things I could conclude is that Oscar doesn’t get support from the team to win the championship — you lose a little bit your mojo.”
Steiner wasn’t done. He suggested McLaren’s much-lauded policy of equal treatment has become a psychological headwind for Piastri. “With all these papaya rules — when they let him pass, let him go, you go, I go… In the end, I think he lost a bit of confidence,” he said. “Qualifying, you’re out there on your own, it’s just difficult. He didn’t have a good lap. You start in Mexico where he started, you haven’t got a chance.”
Harsh? Definitely. Entirely misplaced? Not really. The context matters. Piastri stormed into this season unburdened by expectation, while Norris arrived as McLaren’s de facto spearhead after taking the fight to Max Verstappen last year. Freed up, Piastri hit a brilliant stretch — a burst of wins that set the tone and rattled the field. Since the break, though, the picture’s been choppier: a well-earned victory at Zandvoort and a podium at Monza, but also his first retirement since his rookie season. The pure execution that defined his early run has slipped a beat.
Mexico spotlighted the contrast even within McLaren’s own garage. Piastri qualified eighth, bumped up one place by Sainz’s penalty, then climbed to fifth at the flag — just over a second shy of Oliver Bearman in fourth — while Norris sealed the maximum. On days like that, a teammate win makes a decent salvage job feel like a setback.
Whether you buy Steiner’s line about “support” probably depends on how you read McLaren’s season. The team has been almost painstaking about parity between its drivers — strategy splits when justified, the odd “after you, no after you” radio exchange to keep things clean — and that’s won them admirers while also inviting exactly this sort of narrative when momentum swings. Inside the car, that can seep into the confidence bank, especially on Saturdays. And qualifying has become the heartbeat of modern F1 campaigns: miss your peak window in Q3 by a tenth, and you’re suddenly staring at a long Sunday.
What’s clear is Piastri still has the pace to dictate weekends. Mexico aside, he’s repeatedly shown he can control races from the front and withstand pressure. The title picture is tight enough that a single clean Saturday can flip the mood; Interlagos, with its short lap and variable weather, is precisely the kind of venue where a driver can snap back into rhythm in one session.
Steiner’s critique, then, reads like a paddock nudge as much as a condemnation. He’s seen enough title fights to know the margins get razor-thin late in the year, and the paddock chorus grows louder with every small wobble. For Piastri, the answer is boring and brutal: qualify better, minimize radio chatter, and make sure equal treatment looks like an advantage rather than a headache.
McLaren, for their part, won’t be ripping up the “papaya rules” now. Two drivers in the hunt is a luxury most teams envy, and the mood inside Woking has been notably steady even as the pendulum has swung. But the internal dynamic has shifted, and that’s obvious even without a spreadsheet. Norris has his tail up, Piastri’s searching for the last percent, and the run-in offers little margin for therapy sessions.
Steiner’s line will hang in the air a little longer than most post-race hot takes because it pokes at something real: championship bids are as much about conviction as raw pace. Piastri’s had both this year. Mexico muddied the picture, it didn’t rewrite it. Interlagos will tell us whether that was a blip — or the moment the balance of papaya power truly tilted.
