Brundle: We misread Piastri — Norris’ title rival showed he’s human, not ice
Oscar Piastri spent most of 2025 carrying that “unflappable” label like it was stitched into his overalls. Then Baku happened, the aura cracked, and Lando Norris pounced. If you ask Martin Brundle, that’s less an indictment and more a reminder that the McLaren prodigy is human — and still destined for the biggest prize soon enough.
Piastri, who bulldozed through the junior ranks and looked set to turn his third F1 season into a coronation, led by 34 points after Zandvoort. Then came the slump: six races without a podium, including a scruffy and very out-of-character Azerbaijan weekend where he hit the wall in qualifying and exited the race early.
“He had that fallow period where he wasn’t scoring much from Baku onwards,” Brundle told Sky F1. “You can’t help but think of the little turning points — the rainy corner back in Melbourne where he was unlucky to skate onto the grass, or the hard penalties at Silverstone and Brazil that could’ve easily been five seconds or nothing.”
Norris, relentless and inch-perfect when it mattered, reeled him in and sealed the championship — the first of his career and McLaren’s modern revival writ large. Per the 2025 standings, that feels like justice served for a season fought on the margins between team-mates in the same car, often separated by crumbs in qualifying and even less in race trim.
Brundle’s bigger point wasn’t to flog Piastri for the wobble. It was to challenge the idea that the Australian is made of stone. “I think we might have misread him a little,” he said. “He sort of went missing for six races, threw it in the wall in Baku, and lost his head a little bit. He’s not absolutely stone cold, horizontal. I think he soaks a little as well.”
That nuance matters. Piastri’s reputation is built on economy — with words, with movement, with mistakes. But title fights are long and messy, and the calendar will test even the cleanest operators. Brundle also noted the experience gap: Piastri is still dozens of grands prix shy of Norris’ race count. “Imagine how much Lando has improved in the last three-and-a-half seasons,” he added. “Oscar is a future World Champion. I have no doubt about that.”
Nico Rosberg, who knows about closing the deal against a giant, came to a similar destination from the other end of the spectrum. For him, Piastri’s mentality remains top shelf. “Mentally, he is so strong,” Rosberg said. “I would consider him one of the strongest out there, just so level-headed.”
Inside McLaren, the assessment is even more bullish. Team principal Andrea Stella was matter-of-fact about how thin the paper was between Papaya No. 4 and Papaya No. 81. “Lando is champion. Effectively, we could have had two champions this year. The gap between the two was so small,” he told Sky F1, pointing to the kind of micro-margins that became the season’s soundtrack — at one point calling out 30 milliseconds in qualifying as the whole story.
Stella highlighted the sticky patches too: those low-grip tracks where Piastri briefly lost the thread, the penalties that stung at all the wrong moments. But he kept circling back to the same theme — learning speed. “He learned very rapidly what to do. He became immediately competitive again,” Stella said. “His trajectory is phenomenal, and definitely we have a future multiple World Champion in Oscar.”
That last bit will light up a few WhatsApp groups. Multiple titles? It’s a big call, but it didn’t sound like flattery. It sounded like a boss who watched two drivers push each other to the edge all year, saw one keep his nose clean a fraction more often, and knows the other is coming back sharper.
The takeaway as the paddock resets: Piastri didn’t crumble; he blinked. There’s a difference. This was his first real championship arm wrestle at the top level, complete with the stray lock-ups, bruising penalties and one very expensive Baku weekend. It cost him, yes. It also taught him where the walls are.
And if you believe Brundle, Rosberg and Stella, here’s the scarier part for everyone else: Piastri won’t touch them again.
