Oscar Piastri doesn’t need anyone in the paddock to remind him how 2025 ended, but Martin Brundle has a fairly neat summary of the psychological aftermath: expect him “back with a vengeance” in 2026.
It’s not hard to see why Brundle’s framing lands. Piastri spent long stretches of last season looking every bit like the man to beat in what had the feel of a McLaren civil war. He led the Drivers’ Championship for much of the year and, after the Dutch Grand Prix, had carved out a 34-point cushion over Lando Norris. At that point, the conversation around the garage wasn’t *if* Piastri could manage the run-in, but how McLaren would handle the tension if it became a straight shootout between its two drivers.
Then came the swing that still stings: six races without a podium, momentum bleeding away at precisely the wrong time. Norris did what champions do in those windows — he took the points, absorbed the pressure, and turned a deficit into a lead. With Max Verstappen also muscling back into the picture to make it uncomfortable, Piastri’s title push didn’t just slow; it unraveled.
He did recover his form towards the end, but by then the damage was done. Norris sealed his first world championship, with Verstappen only two points behind, while Piastri had to settle for third overall — a result that reads respectable on paper and feels anything but when you’ve spent the year in front.
Brundle’s point, speaking on Sky, wasn’t simply that Piastri will be motivated. It was that last season contained the kind of mixed lesson-set that tends to sharpen elite drivers rather than soften them.
“Yeah,” Brundle said when asked if he backed Piastri to go one better in 2026. “I think he’ll come back with a vengeance, to be honest.
“It was partly painful, partly brilliant for him, last year. He learned a lot. I think that it’s openly accepted that on the really low grip circuits, he’s not getting the best out of the car and out of the tyre. So he knows he’s got to fix that.”
That’s the key detail buried inside the vengeance line: it’s not about raw speed. Piastri has already shown he can dominate races when the conditions suit him — Brundle made a point of highlighting how emphatic some of those wins were. The unfinished business is the awkward weekends, the ones where the surface is low grip, the tyre is peaky, and the line between “good points” and “where did that go?” can be a couple of degrees of temperature or a single phase of track evolution.
In modern F1, those are the weekends that decide titles. Not because champions never have off days, but because they limit the bleeding. A podiumless run across six races is essentially a championship donation, and Piastri has lived the consequences.
Brundle also leaned into what many in the paddock say privately about Piastri: he’s not a driver who needs drama to get moving. He’s methodical, bright, and — crucially — a worker.
“We’ve observed him. He’s an incredibly bright lad, and he’s clearly competitive. He’s a worker,” Brundle added. “I think he’ll come back having made a big step forward.”
The backdrop to all this, of course, is that 2026 isn’t just “next season” — it’s the start of a new rules era. Everyone’s learning, everyone’s exposed, and the drivers who adapt quickest to the new cars’ quirks will steal points before the competitive order settles. It’s a season that will reward fast learners and punish passengers, and Piastri’s reputation is built on how quickly he joins the dots.
McLaren has already put him back to work. Piastri returned to the cockpit during the Barcelona shakedown, taking another step into the team’s new machine after first sampling it on Thursday. His initial running, though, wasn’t spotless: a fuel systems issue interrupted the programme and cut into valuable early mileage.
That’s the mundane reality of this time of year — a problem you’d rather have now than in qualifying when the points are real — but it also underlines how tight the margins will be in the opening rounds. With new cars, a curtailed morning can mean a lost direction, and a lost direction can turn into a compromised first flyaway.
Still, if there’s a driver who’s likely to treat a frustrating shakedown glitch as a footnote rather than an omen, it’s probably Piastri. The more interesting question is what form his response to 2025 actually takes once the lights go out: does he come out swinging immediately, or does he play the long game and make sure those low-grip, tyre-sensitive weekends stop being the ones that define his season?
Either way, the McLaren dynamic shifts in 2026. Norris enters wearing the number one and the weight that comes with it, and Piastri arrives with a year of evidence that he can lead a championship — and a year of scars that show exactly how it can be lost.
Brundle’s “vengeance” line is catchy. The substance is sharper: if Piastri really has made that “big step forward”, the version of him we see this year won’t just be faster on his good days. He’ll be harder to move on his bad ones. And that, more than any vow of payback, is how titles get won.
