Oscar Piastri slipped out of the FIA garage in São Paulo with that telltale look drivers get when the stopwatch doesn’t match the seat-of-the-pants feel. He says McLaren has “some kind of evidence” to explain why he was adrift in Austin and Mexico, even though nothing felt obviously wrong in the cockpit. And yet, as the title run-in starts to squeeze, there’s a blunt admission too: some of this might never be fully understood.
That’s not the soundtrack you expect from the guy who, a few races ago, held the cards. Piastri’s Dutch Grand Prix win and Lando Norris’ DNF put the Australian 34 points clear and made him the favourite to finish 2025 on top. The pendulum’s swung hard since. With Las Vegas, Qatar and Abu Dhabi left on the board — plus a Sprint — Piastri trails Norris by 24, on a five-race podium drought while the other side of the garage has banked two wins and a Sprint.
Baku started the slide. Piastri is willing to write that off as an oddball weekend — a messy run where he crashed in qualifying and the race, McLaren juggled issues on both cars, and the tyre usage bordered on the bizarre. The speed, he insists, was there; he simply over-reached. Austin and Mexico were different, and that’s where the concern is.
“In Austin and Mexico I actually feel like I executed reasonably well, but the lap time has just been not there,” Piastri said on Thursday. “We’ve got some kind of evidence as to why it’s not been there. But the question as to why some things have not been working the last couple of weekends, and why some things have been — that part, I’m not sure we’ll ever know the answer to.”
That’s the part that gnaws at drivers. When the car’s off and you feel it, you can fix it. When the car feels fine and you’re still two or three tenths short of your teammate across a stint, it’s far trickier. There’s a strong hint here that McLaren’s been juggling a narrow operating window with the MCL39 — not exactly a revelation for a modern ground-effect car — and Piastri’s fallen on the wrong side of it at the worst time.
He’s quick to separate the strands. Baku? “A messy weekend from start to finish with a lot of different factors,” he said, chalking it up to a wild practice programme, C6 tyre running and a couple of gremlins on both cars. Austin and Mexico? “It’s just been about lacking performance and trying to find out where to find it.”
Those last eight words will define his season. Finding it.
Because the margins now are brutal. Norris has been ruthlessly tidy since Zandvoort, kicking open every door Piastri has left ajar. That matters at McLaren in 2025, when the title fight is an in-house affair without the political shrapnel you get when two different teams clash. The relationship, by all accounts, has stayed intact — no radio sniping, no passive-aggressive post-race briefings. But the scoreboard is the scoreboard, and Norris has the momentum.
From the outside, it’s easy to say “handle the pressure.” From the inside, pressure is when your references from FP2 make perfect sense, your balance is exactly where you wanted it, and then you check the lap delta and feel the ground tilt. It’s when you leave one weekend convinced you’ve understood the loss, and the next weekend tells you that you haven’t. That’s the headspace Piastri’s been walking through.
The saving grace is that McLaren believes there’s something tangible in the data from Austin and Mexico — enough to direct setup and tyre usage for the final triple-header. The concession is that knowing “there’s a difference” doesn’t always equal a push-button fix. The best drivers translate that uncertainty into aggressiveness without tipping over the edge. Zandvoort proved Piastri can do it. Baku proved there’s a line.
What happens next is about risk tolerance. Vegas can reward a confident front end and decisive braking; Qatar will punish any tyre miscue; Abu Dhabi’s final sector is the truth serum. Piastri doesn’t need to reinvent himself — his high points this year were built on clean execution and a knack for rhythm, not heroics. He does need to reacquaint himself with the sweet spot, quickly.
If you’re looking for a tell, watch qualifying. When Piastri’s within a whisker of Norris on Saturday, Sunday tends to take care of itself. When the gap creeps in over a single lap, it’s usually a preview of the wear-and-tear that shows up across a stint. He knows it. McLaren knows it. The title maths knows it.
There’s still a world where this swings again. Twenty-four points with three grands prix and a Sprint to go isn’t insurmountable, not with the volatility of 2025 and a car that can be the class of the field when it’s in the window. But it requires clarity. Evidence is good. Answers are better.
Piastri’s final thought before practice felt like both a shrug and a promise. “Knowing that there’s a difference is the biggest thing,” he said. Translation: give me the target and I’ll go hunting. The clock’s ticking. The hunt starts now.
