Johnny Herbert: Piastri let a ‘slam dunk’ title slip away — and that has to change
Oscar Piastri left Abu Dhabi with a podium, a handshake line of admirers and, depending on where you stood in the McLaren garage, either a season of promise or a nagging what-if. Johnny Herbert is firmly in the latter camp.
In the former F1 racer’s view, Piastri allowed a championship that was his to lose to slide out of his grasp. “He missed a slam dunk,” Herbert said, arguing that mental steel — not raw speed — is the lever Piastri needs to pull before he returns in 2026. It’s a punchy verdict, but it’s hard to ignore the shape of the year that got away.
After Zandvoort, Piastri had clean air: a 34-point cushion over Lando Norris and a yawning gap to Max Verstappen. That should have been the platform. Instead, Verstappen went on a relentless run to the flag, stitching together a perfect podium streak and six wins. Norris, wounded by his Dutch GP retirement, found something extra. And Piastri? Six races without a podium, a wobble that turned a commanding hand into a late-season chase. He rallied in Qatar and Yas Marina, but not quite enough. Norris clinched the crown by the slimmest of margins over Verstappen; Piastri ended up third, narrowly adrift.
Herbert, never one to sugarcoat, drew a sharp line between being quick and being unbreakable. “Everything was in his favour,” he said, noting how the quality Piastri showed early “evaporated” as the pressure rose. The message: champions don’t let momentum go missing. Verstappen wouldn’t, Norris didn’t, and at times Piastri did.
It’s worth remembering the context here. This was only Piastri’s third season in Formula 1, and he was fighting through the sharp end of a title race that refused to settle down. There’s no shame in being beat by Norris and Verstappen in a year this tight. But when you’ve already shown you can control a championship from the front, the bar moves. And that’s basically Herbert’s point: the ceiling is obvious, now raise the floor.
Expect Mark Webber to be central to that programme. Piastri’s manager has guided him with a steady hand since the junior days, and Herbert reckons that partnership will now focus on the space between the ears as much as the stopwatch. The Australian is a smooth operator on and off the track; he’ll need to become a little more ruthless when the tide turns against him.
McLaren, for their part, aren’t fretting. Team principal Andrea Stella was effusive after Abu Dhabi, underlining just how fine the margins were between the papaya pair. “It was thirty milliseconds in qualifying,” Stella said, the kind of detail a team boss savours and a driver lives with all winter. He called Piastri a “worthwhile champion” in all but name, praising how fast the Australian processed and solved his rough patches on low-grip circuits. In Stella’s eyes, Piastri’s trajectory points to multiple titles. That’s not bluster from Woking; it’s how they truly rate him.
There’s a truth in here that suits all sides. Norris grew into the responsibility of leading a title campaign and got it done. Verstappen did Verstappen things when it mattered. And Piastri showed enough peaks to convince almost everyone he’ll be back at the same table next time he’s in a car capable of it.
Herbert’s language might sound harsh, but the underlying message is a compliment wrapped in a jab: you only criticise a driver this way if you think he can do it. The time gaps were tiny, the points gaps tighter. A couple of key Sundays went missing. That’s the job in front of Piastri now — not to find new speed, but to refuse to have off-weeks when the stakes climb. The champions narrow their own margins for error.
The upside? He’s already built the scaffolding. Quick in traffic, clinical on out-laps, excellent tyre instincts when the windows are narrow. That doesn’t vanish. It just needs to be there in the moments that sting. If the Dutch GP was the pivot, the lesson is clear enough to take into 2026: close the door when you have the lead, don’t give anyone daylight.
No one inside McLaren is calling this season a miss. It was a statement. Norris finally got his, and Piastri stood up in a campaign that turned into a two-team arm wrestle. The Australian will head into his next run at it with more scars and, if Herbert gets his wish, a bit more scar tissue. And sometimes that’s exactly what makes the difference when a championship starts to wobble.
