Pressure pinch or just a street-fight bruise? Villeneuve questions Piastri after Baku wobble, McLaren shrugs it off
Oscar Piastri’s title campaign finally showed a crack in Baku. A qualifying crash, a botched start into anti-stall, and a brush with the Turn 5 wall on Lap 1 left the championship leader with a weekend he’ll want to file under “lessons learned.” Jacques Villeneuve’s verdict was less forgiving: to the 1997 champion, this looked like pressure finally getting its claws into the McLaren star.
Piastri had walked out of Zandvoort with a 34-point cushion over Lando Norris and the aura of a man with the season on a string. Villeneuve, speaking then, warned that the mentality changes when you’re the hunted with a buffer. It becomes your championship to lose, and that little safety net can twist your driving — a touch more defensive, a fraction less instinctive — and that’s when mistakes creep in.
Two races later, Max Verstappen has absolutely not read the McLaren script. The Red Bull driver has banked back-to-back wins, Norris missed his chance to compound Piastri’s pain with only P7 in Baku, and the gap between the McLaren teammates is down to 25 points. It’s still a proper lead, but it no longer feels like a parade.
Villeneuve, watching Piastri clip the wall during qualifying in Azerbaijan before the messy Sunday unraveled, didn’t mince words on social media: the Australian looked “erratic” and “feeling the pressure,” saved only by Norris fluffing his own laps. Coming from someone who’s navigated a title run-in, the cautionary tone landed with a thud.
The facts of Piastri’s Baku are hard to sugar-coat. He wasn’t alone in getting caught out by the track, but he did, and it forced him onto the back foot. The start — into anti-stall after a shuffle on the grid — dumped him to the rear. Moments later, he kissed the wall at Turn 5 and that was that. For a driver whose calling card since the junior ranks has been ice-cold composure, it felt out of character.
McLaren, though, isn’t reaching for the anxiety button. Andrea Stella has seen a few title fights up close, and his read was familiar: even the greats have days like this.
“I’ve worked with multiple champions,” he said, name-checking Michael Schumacher among others, “and even in their most dominant seasons, you get weekends where the grip picture is misjudged and the sport punishes you. The most valuable thing you take away is the learning.”
There’s no hint of a pile-on internally. Stella’s point was that this wasn’t a cascade of unforced errors born of panic, but the type of street-circuit sting that lights up the debrief. Start P9 in Baku, he added, and your ceiling isn’t sky-high even without the glitches. Piastri, for his part, was already processing and moving on before the paddock had packed.
If you want to play armchair psychologist, Villeneuve’s earlier observation remains the needle in the record: when you have a cushion, do you get conservative? Do you second-guess? Do you relax half a percent? We’ve seen drivers lose a heap of points by changing the way they drive the moment the standings tilt their way.
The other half of the equation is Verstappen’s resurgence. Red Bull looked sharp and tidy again these last two rounds, the kind of clear-eyed efficiency that swallows points in big bites. If that’s the new normal — and if Norris doesn’t convert more of McLaren’s pace into Sundays — Piastri’s margin won’t stay fat for long.
So is Piastri “feeling the pressure”? Maybe in the way any leader feels it when the room gets quiet and every mistake echoes. The difference between wobble and unraveling will be what happens next.
Singapore, with its stop-start rhythm and zero-margin walls, isn’t exactly the soft landing you’d choose after Baku, but it’s also ripe for a reset. Piastri’s strength has been extracting speed without drama; get that back and the story flips in a heartbeat. If the scrappiness lingers, the field — led by a suddenly buoyant Verstappen — will be all too happy to keep twisting the knife.
Call it a first proper stress test of a title campaign that, until Zandvoort, looked remarkably serene. Champions don’t avoid bad weekends; they make sure the bad weekends don’t multiply. We’re about to see which column Baku belongs in for Oscar Piastri.
