Oscar Piastri’s season hasn’t exactly unraveled, but the thread has definitely snagged.
Coming out of the summer break, the McLaren driver looked the sharpest blade in the title fight. Now, after a bruising run since Baku, he’s trailed by Lando Norris in the points and watching Max Verstappen close back in. With three race weekends left, the margin for error has evaporated.
Jacques Villeneuve thinks the answer sits squarely in the cockpit. The 1997 world champion told Sky Sports that Piastri needs to “personalise” the MCL38 the way Norris has.
“Norris worked on his car,” Villeneuve said. “He’s done the first step, and he really got in with the team to personalise that car. Unless Piastri is capable of doing the same thing, you’ll never get back to that level.”
There’s no great mystery in that critique. McLaren’s development surge came with a narrower operating window, and Norris has sunk into it like a driver wearing a suit tailored to his shoulders. Piastri, whose superpower over the last 18 months has been metronomic calm and clean precision, is now hunting for feel from a car that’s drifted away from him during race weekends.
The numbers tell the story. Norris is 24 points clear of Piastri, with Verstappen 25 behind the Australian. That’s close enough for a pendulum swing, but only if Piastri arrests the slide immediately.
Brazil didn’t help. Piastri was upbeat on Friday in São Paulo, talking about “flashes” of comfort in the car, before the weekend slipped through his fingers.
“Things have not been going easily, that’s for sure,” he said. “I think this weekend, there were definitely moments and flashes where I felt very comfortable. In practice, things were coming much more easily again, things felt really good. It kind of went away from us a little bit through the weekend.
“I think even just our pace as a team, I don’t think it was as strong as it was on Friday, and the car kind of went in a direction that I wasn’t a big fan of. But we tried our best to get the car in a good window, and obviously, the Sprint crash made things much more difficult as well.
“So, there’s just a lot of things going wrong at the moment, but I think there are still flashes of really strong pace, and it’s just about trying to make sure I’ve got that all the time.”
That’s the Piastri conundrum in a paragraph: the speed is in there, the consistency isn’t. He’s not the first driver to find that when a top team turns the development taps on, the car’s DNA can subtly lean towards one driver’s strengths. Norris, who’s been ferociously effective over one lap and harder to shake on Sundays, has clearly locked in a base he trusts. Piastri’s side has been more experimental, chasing balance with setup swings that look brave when they land and expensive when they don’t.
Villeneuve’s “personalise” line isn’t about personality, it’s about assertiveness. It’s the difference between adapting to the car and making the car adapt to you – in the data meetings, in the long-run plans on Fridays, in saying no when a direction doesn’t suit. It’s also, frankly, what title-winning seasons demand when the pressure hits in November.
None of this erases what Piastri’s done this year. He came out of the blocks with poise, raced hard without collateral damage, and put himself in a fight that most didn’t expect to be this tight this late. But he needs a clean, boring weekend now: tidy qualifying, no self-inflicted wounds, and a car that behaves the same way from FP1 to the chequered flag.
McLaren, for their part, will know the stakes. Split strategies and divergent setups are fine when both cars are scoring heavy, less so when one driver’s confidence is ebbing. They’ve built a rocket ship; the last job is making sure both pilots can fly it their way.
Three weekends, two rivals, one reset required. Piastri doesn’t need a reinvention. He needs what he showed on Friday in São Paulo, but for an entire Grand Prix – control, clarity, and a McLaren that feels like his. Only then does the title talk stop sounding hypothetical.
