There’s a particular kind of scar a title slip leaves behind: not the public disappointment, but the private knowledge of how quickly a season can turn when you’re the one holding the advantage.
Oscar Piastri heads into 2026 with exactly that. For long stretches of 2025 he looked like the safest bet on the grid — quick, calm, and backed by a points buffer that suggested his first championship was becoming a matter of time. After Zandvoort, 15 races in, he’d built a 34-point lead over Lando Norris. By the time the chequered flag fell on the year, Norris had flipped the entire story, finishing 13 points clear and taking the title while Piastri settled for third in the standings.
It’s the sort of swing that can either calcify a driver or sharpen him. Christian Horner is betting on the latter.
Speaking on Australia’s *Today* programme ahead of a speaking tour, the former Red Bull team boss painted Piastri’s 2025 fade not as a warning sign, but as a necessary (and painful) chapter in the driver’s education.
“Oscar will have learned a huge amount from last year,” Horner said. “I thought he was odds-on favourite going into the summer break, and unfortunately, it sort of fell apart for him at the end of the season.
“But he’ll learn from that, and that will have hurt him, and ultimately motivated him.”
In paddock terms, “hurt” is doing a lot of work there. A late-season loss to your team-mate — after holding a lead that healthy — doesn’t just sting; it rewires how you approach the next year. Every marginal call gets revisited. Every run plan, every risk threshold, every moment you chose patience over aggression (or the other way round) suddenly has a cost attached to it.
The interesting part is that Piastri’s reputation has largely been built on the opposite: composure, low-drama execution, an ability to keep the weekend tidy. That’s usually a superpower in a long championship, but 2025 will have been an uncomfortable reminder that calm alone doesn’t protect you when momentum shifts — especially when the driver across the garage is good enough to smell vulnerability and keep the pressure on.
Horner’s backing also came with a pointed reminder about experience. Piastri is still early in his Formula 1 career, and Horner clearly sees the 2025 collapse not as a defining feature, but as a data point — a hard lesson in the phase of a career where drivers typically do their most important learning.
“You forget the guy’s only done a couple of seasons in Formula 1,” Horner added. “He’s so relatively inexperienced that I think he’s just going to get better and better and he’s going to be fully motivated for the season ahead.”
That “better and better” line is classic Horner: simple, slightly promotional, but not empty. Drivers don’t usually take a step back after a season like that — not if they’ve got the tools in the first place. What changes is edge. How quickly they react when a weekend starts drifting. How ruthlessly they take points when the win isn’t there. How firmly they insist on the tiny team-side decisions that protect a title bid across 24 races.
And, crucially, how they deal with the one opponent who sees everything: the guy in the other car.
If 2025 was the year Norris landed the final blows, 2026 becomes the season where Piastri has to prove he can live in that world for the full distance — not just as the quick one, but as the one who doesn’t blink when the title fight turns into a weekly negotiation with your own team-mate.
Horner, meanwhile, will soon be in Australia in person. The 52-year-old is due in Melbourne on 24 February as part of a speaking tour that will take him through several cities, pitching what he described as a look back at his career — the “highs, the lows”, the drivers he’s worked with, and the sort of behind-the-scenes detail fans rarely get in the usual media cadence of a race weekend.
“I’m looking forward to coming,” Horner said. “I’m coming to Melbourne on the 24th of Feb and I’ve been invited to do this speaking tour, and it’s a great way just to reflect on my career.
“The highs, the lows, the sport, the drivers we’ve had, the Aussies that I’ve had drive for me, and really give an insight into some of the behind-the-scenes stuff that the people don’t know.”
In another context it might read like simple plug-and-play promo. But the timing is neat: Horner talking about a young Australian driver needing to metabolise a painful year is, in its own way, a reminder of what F1 does best. It builds reputations quickly — and it takes them apart just as fast.
For Piastri, 2026 isn’t about “revenge” as much as it is about response. The sport doesn’t really care how you lose a title. It only notices what you become afterwards.
