Jacques Villeneuve thinks he’s cracked the code behind Oscar Piastri’s recent fade. And, as ever with the 1997 world champion, it isn’t a gentle take.
In Villeneuve’s view, Piastri’s dip isn’t about McLaren suddenly handing him a lemon or the tyres going weird. It’s the psychology of a title fight. When the pressure climbed and the pack reeled McLaren in, Lando Norris found another gear — and Piastri hit his ceiling.
“Look at any sport,” Villeneuve said on Sky’s The F1 Show. “As it gets closer to the playoffs, some teams rise, others crumble. It’s the same here.” His point: early in the season, when McLaren had a margin and Norris admitted he wasn’t entirely at ease with the car, Piastri looked sensational. Five wins in eight races from China created the impression he’d put Norris in a box. But was that Piastri stepping up, or Lando not quite switched on yet?
What’s happened since supports Villeneuve’s narrative. After Norris’s retirement at Zandvoort — a race Piastri won — Lando has been relentless, missing the podium just once. He then won Mexico City to retake the championship lead for the first time since Saudi Arabia, and Piastri, fifth on the day, now trails his teammate by a single point. The momentum has a colour, and it’s papaya — but only on one side of the garage right now.
Piastri’s last three results read fourth in Singapore, then fifth in Austin and Mexico City. On paper, hardly a meltdown. On the stopwatch, nuance matters. Villeneuve believes that when Max Verstappen and others started snapping at McLaren’s heels — aided by Woking switching development focus early towards the looming rules overhaul — Norris found those last two tenths. Piastri didn’t. “When you’re cruising within the limit, the car feels perfect. Ask for a couple of tenths more, suddenly everything’s wrong,” he said.
It’s a classic racer’s cautionary tale. When you chase a teammate’s data corner-by-corner, you can drift away from your own strengths. That’s where Villeneuve says drivers start “inventing” setups, overthinking, and spiralling. The car hasn’t transformed, he argues; the demands have. Same tyres, similar machinery, very different headspace.
There’s also the dynamic of a yardstick shifting on you mid-season. Early doors, Norris was vocal about not being completely comfortable — and still banked heavy points — which possibly emboldened Piastri. Then the field tightened, the stakes rose, and the team’s clear leader in pressure moments re-emerged. In that scenario, the harder you push, the easier it is to fall into that purgatory where the car only gets worse the more you search.
Not everyone is buying the psychoanalysis. Martin Brundle has pushed back on the armchair diagnosing and there’s been plenty of noise — some of it blunt — about execution rather than psyche. This is F1, after all: if you slip even half a step while your teammate surges, the optics get brutal fast.
Still, Villeneuve’s read taps into something real about title fights. The rhythm of a season changes once the easy points dry up. McLaren switched off big-ticket updates to concentrate resources on next year’s regulations, the field closed, and the pressure gradient steepened. That’s when the truly great seasons tend to harden, not fray.
None of this means Piastri is cooked. He’s already shown he can win from the front and fight under stress; it’s why he’s in this conversation at all. The task now is the tough one: recentre, stop chasing Lando’s ghost in the data, and re-find the feel that had him bossing Sundays back in the spring. If he does that, the championship complexion flips again in a heartbeat. If he doesn’t, Norris will keep prising open the gap he worked so hard to reclaim in Mexico.
This thing has a few twists left. But for now, Villeneuve’s theory lands with a thud in the paddock: when the heat came up, Norris rose. Piastri’s job is to prove that’s not the whole story.
