Oscar Piastri has had the kind of early-2026 season that makes for lazy television narratives: one muted weekend, a teammate on the podium, and suddenly the conversation shifts from performance to “stock”.
Nico Rosberg and Jacques Villeneuve went there after Barcelona, where Lando Norris finished on the rostrum and Piastri trailed home fifth, around half a minute behind. Rosberg suggested Piastri’s “market value has taken a bit of a plunge”, while Villeneuve claimed “nobody’s talking about him anymore”.
That’s a catchy line. It’s also the sort of thing that sounds truer the less you look at the numbers — and the less you care about what McLaren’s actually been fighting in the opening stretch of a regulation reset.
James Courtney, never one to let an Australian driver get waved off in a throwaway segment, called the verdict harsh and, more to the point, shallow. His read is simple: McLaren hasn’t given either driver a platform that flatters them, so picking out Piastri as the one whose reputation is supposedly taking a hit is a reach.
“I think it’s a pretty harsh summary of his season,” Courtney said, arguing that McLaren’s struggles have made it difficult for Piastri to “look good” in the way he did when the team had a more consistently competitive package. Courtney also questioned whether Rosberg and Villeneuve’s distance from the sharp end of modern F1 is showing.
Garth Tander, a six-time Bathurst winner who tends to speak like someone who’s spent his life around engineers and race debriefs, found the reactionary angle even stranger. Barcelona, he pointed out, is one weekend — not a referendum on a driver’s standing in a paddock that mostly judges you on what you can do over a season and, crucially, what you can do when the car isn’t perfect.
Because here’s the part that doesn’t fit the “plunging value” script: Piastri is five points behind Norris, who is not just his teammate but the reigning world champion. If we’re using 2026’s reality rather than last Sunday’s highlight reel, that’s an awfully thin margin for a supposed reputational collapse.
The truth is that McLaren’s year has been choppy in ways that make individual form harder to read than the louder punditry admits. Both drivers have a technical DNF on the books. Both have two non-scores. Norris’ retirements in Canada and Monaco were down to reliability. Piastri’s season has been bitten by the new-era growing pains too: a power surge on the way to the grid in Australia triggered wheelspin into the barrier, and a misfiring tyre call cost him dearly in Canada.
If you’re determined to pin blame, you can argue Australia was partly on Piastri — but it was also the first race of an all-new engine formula, and he wasn’t the only one caught out by energy deployment and electrical gremlins in those opening weekends. This is what regulation changeovers look like when the sport’s pretending it isn’t still in the prototype business.
And in terms of outputs when the car does behave? Piastri and Norris have mirrored each other more than they’ve diverged. They’ve both bagged two podiums — a second and a third apiece — and they’ve both landed two fifth-place finishes. The gap between them has been shaped by Sprint results rather than any sustained trend of one driver “falling off” and the other soaring.
That’s why Tander’s most pointed rebuttal wasn’t about Barcelona at all — it was about what happens if the driver market goes live.
He framed it as a hypothetical: if Max Verstappen ever did leave Red Bull and chairs started moving, does anyone seriously think Piastri wouldn’t be near the top of the call sheet for the teams with real ambition? Tander’s answer was blunt. Red Bull, Mercedes — whoever had a genuine vacancy at the front — would be ringing Piastri early, not waiting to see whether a post-race TV segment had cooled down.
It’s not hard to see why. In this paddock, “market value” isn’t dictated by whether you were 30 seconds behind your teammate on a bad Sunday. It’s dictated by whether the people who matter — team principals, technical directors, the engineers who have to work with you through a long winter — believe you can lead a project, extract performance when the rear end isn’t behaving, and deliver points when the straightforward podium isn’t on.
Right now, McLaren’s bigger issue is that neither Norris nor Piastri has had a car that consistently does them justice. They’ve both talked about wanting more downforce from the MCL40. They’ve both been left managing the knock-on effects of engine and battery headaches. And in a season where even Verstappen has found life more difficult than the myth suggests, the idea that Piastri is uniquely “slipping” feels more like content than analysis.
Piastri doesn’t need defending as much as he needs a McLaren that stops tripping over itself. If that arrives, the chatter will vanish as quickly as it appeared — because F1’s attention span is short, but lap time still has a way of restoring reputations.
