Damon Hill to Piastri: stop being the nice guy if you want that title
Oscar Piastri doesn’t need many lessons in racecraft. In 2025 he passed Max Verstappen with the kind of cool, clean aggression that makes the paddock sit up. What he might need, according to Damon Hill, is a little less generosity when the big trophy’s on the line.
Speaking on the Drive to Wynn podcast, the 1996 world champion laid out a simple message for the McLaren driver heading into 2026: be selfish.
“I think he probably felt the worst he was going to feel after Qatar,” Hill said, reflecting on McLaren’s strategic misstep under the lights that handed the upper hand to Verstappen at Losail. “He had some misfortune… and he’s lost out because of some decisions with McLaren, trying to be fair.”
The example that still stings? Monza. Piastri, then leading the standings after a commanding win in Zandvoort, was set for second behind Verstappen when a slow stop for Lando Norris shuffled the order. McLaren asked Piastri to hand the place back, citing team error. He did it. Verstappen chuckled about it on the radio. And the air went out of Piastri’s title run.
From there the tide turned. A crash in Baku and a flat patch that followed left the Australian scrambling to rediscover the form that had carried him to a 34-point advantage over Norris with nine rounds left. He found it again late — strong drives in Qatar and Abu Dhabi — but not in time. Third in the championship wasn’t the script he’d been writing through the European summer.
For Hill, those weekends should sharpen Piastri’s edges, not dull them.
“Wow, that’s quite a big thing to do, isn’t it, to give points away to a guy you could be fighting for the world championship?” Hill said of Monza. “He will probably look at that and go, ‘Well, maybe I won’t do that again.’”
Hill’s advice for 2026 is blunt: put your own campaign first. “Next year, if I were him, I’d be coming back saying, ‘Listen, I love the team, and it’s been great, but I have to think of myself. It’s my career… If the situation arises and you ask me to return points to my teammate… I can’t afford to do that. I did it last year. That could have cost me the World Championship.’”
That might sound ruthless, but this is the level where ruthlessness tends to win. And it’s not as if Piastri lacks the combative tools. Hill thinks one of the 24-year-old’s biggest assets is exactly what we saw in 2025: decisive, low-drama overtaking when it counts — especially against Verstappen.
“I think Max recognises that Oscar will not hesitate, won’t think twice,” Hill said. “He arrives, and then he’s attacked; he just goes straight in there. That’s one of his highest skills.”
The contrast with Norris was used as a case study. In Miami, Piastri hustled past the four-time champion with confidence; Norris, tucked a couple of seconds back, needed multiple goes and bled time in the process. It’s a small sample, sure, but it tracks with how each driver tends to shape a fight: Piastri crisp and committed, Norris more patient, occasionally too patient when Verstappen is setting the tempo.
And when the racing gets messy — think Saudi Arabia’s elbows-out exchanges — Hill doesn’t see Piastri flinching. “I don’t think Oscar’s particularly intimidated by that… Lando can be a little bit more circumspect and wary of Max, and Max knows that.”
None of this is a plea for civil war at McLaren. The team’s rise has been powered by a pairing that mostly pulled in the same direction through 2025. But if Woking build another title-ready car for the new year, the internal calculus changes. That’s the uneasy truth of a front-running lineup: cooperation gets you to the fight; instinct wins it.
Piastri has already shown he belongs in that conversation. The next step is about choices in the heat of it — the kind that decide whether you finish your season with a smile on a cool-down lap, or wondering why the guy on the radio got to write your story.
