Villeneuve’s prescription for Piastri: loosen the grip, find the flow
Six months in front, one lap too many in Mexico City. Oscar Piastri walked out of the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez having ceded the World Championship lead he’d guarded since spring, the scales tipped by a dominant win for Lando Norris and a Sunday salvage to fifth for the Australian.
Piastri started seventh, wrestled his way forward, and threw in a sharp Turn 1 move on George Russell for good measure. It was enough to limit the damage, not enough to stop the swing. For the first time since Saudi Arabia, the McLaren garage has a new points leader, with Norris now one clear of his teammate and four rounds to go.
The margins are microscopic, the mood anything but. Piastri admitted the last couple of weekends have demanded a very different way of driving compared to most of the season, and he’s been trying to wrestle the MCL38 back into his comfort zone. That, Jacques Villeneuve says, is exactly the point.
“He salvaged the weekend,” the 1997 World Champion told Sky F1 after Mexico. “He’s only one point behind Lando now, but still hard to swallow for him.” Villeneuve’s diagnosis is simple enough: Piastri needs to relax his shoulders and let the car breathe again. When a title fight tightens, so do drivers; the trick is to make sure only one of those things happens.
“Lando is probably driving better than he was before, so he’s made a little step, and Oscar is driving a little bit worse, and then that increases the step,” Villeneuve said. “If he’s a little bit stressed and drives tight, not comfortable, not smooth and soft, that will take away a little bit as well, and he will never find the balance in the car. So that’s the big issue. He needs to get back into a comfortable, calm zone.”
The temptation in these moments is to copy what’s working on the other side of the garage. Villeneuve isn’t buying that either. “Every driver on the planet drives differently. You cannot just put a setup and it will work on everyone, it has to be natural,” he added. In other words, Norris finding magic with his engineers doesn’t mean Piastri should chase the same numbers. The Australian’s early-season authority didn’t come from imitation.
Piastri’s Mexico was more grit than gloss. A scrappy Saturday left him in traffic on a circuit that punishes anything but precision, and while the fightback to P5 was operationally tidy—overtakes banked, pit work clean—it still landed him on the wrong end of a momentum shift. Villeneuve pointed out that circumstances helped keep Piastri in touch, referencing a time penalty for Lewis Hamilton as part of the calculus that kept the gap manageable. Regardless, the net result is a title battle that’s now knife-edge close and psychologically complex.
This is Piastri’s first run at a championship under proper heat, and it shows—but not in a way that should spook McLaren. The broader picture is that the quickest car of late has been papaya, and both drivers are converting. Norris has found a rhythm that’s brutally efficient over one lap and kind to the tyres on Sunday. Piastri has had to adapt his inputs and reshape his confidence on the fly, which is never ideal when trophies start to loom.
McLaren, for its part, has a fine line to walk: keep the garage neutral, keep the strategies clean, and let the pace settle it. The harder part is invisible—managing two drivers who both believe this is theirs to win. That’s a luxury problem, but a problem all the same.
Interlagos is next, and it’s a circuit that rewards calm hands and clean lines more than clenched jaws. The Esses ask for flow. Miss by a whisker and the lap never comes back to you. It’s the kind of place where “driving tight,” as Villeneuve put it, costs lap time you can’t quite find in the data.
None of this says Piastri’s story flipped for good in Mexico. The gap is a single point. He didn’t crater when a bad Saturday gave him a hard Sunday; he ground out the result and lived to fight in Brazil. But the next step is obvious: stop surviving and start dictating again. The title may ultimately be decided by who looks most at ease when the car, the tyres and the timing all ask awkward questions.
Piastri doesn’t need to reinvent his season. He just needs to remember it.
