The forgotten twists of fate that conspired against Piastri as truth over spiral explained
There’s one race remaining in this late swing through the Americas, but already it’s been a defining one for the championship and for erstwhile title leader Oscar Piastri.
When he arrived in Austin for the first leg of the journey, he held a comfortable 22-point advantage over teammate Lando Norris.
Three races later and the Australian has suffered a painful 46-point swing against him.
He’ll line up in Las Vegas next weekend 24 points in deficit.
Fox Sports, available on Kayo Sports, is the only place to watch every practice, qualifying session and race in the 2025 FIA Formula One World Championship™ LIVE in 4K. New to Kayo? Join now and get your first month for just $1.
It’s a scenario that would have seemed improbable as little as a month ago and totally lacking in credibility after the Dutch Grand Prix, when Piastri established what at the time seemed a secure 34-point advantage.
Nearing the end of a championship that’s ebbed and flowed gently between Piastri and Norris, the points have suddenly become a torrent.
Norris has slammed on scores at an exponential rate to put Piastri on the ropes — the Englishman scored three points on his teammate in Monza, six in Baku, three in Singapore, eight in Austin, 15 in Mexico City and now 23 in Sao Paulo.
The trajectory isn’t simply negative; it’s spiralling out of control.
READ MORE
‘OUT THE WINDOW’: The ‘final straw’ for broken F1 system as great backflips over Piastri blow
‘CAN’T DISAPPEAR’: Why Piastri was robbed as fatal flaw behind penalty shock laid bare
At 24 points, this is Norris’s largest advantage of the season, eclipsing the 23-point lead he opened after the Australian Grand Prix, where Piastri spun off the road in the wet.
It’s the fourth-largest gap of the entire season, trailing only the lead Piastri enjoyed after the Dutch Grand Prix and the following two rounds.
While it’s one-point short of the full 25 points available for a race win, and though there’s still 83 points up for grabs this season, Norris’s lead has moved him beyond a crucial threshold.
He can now finish second to Piastri in all three remaining grands prix and the final sprint and still win the championship with what would be a two-point lead.
Norris is in control.
Piastri is in desperate need of some.
“The blame is not all on Oscar!” | 00:36
THE NUMBERS
The statistics paint a grim picture.
After 14 podiums from the first 16 rounds, Piastri hasn’t taken home a trophy in five weekends, a span stretching from his disastrous round in Azerbaijan to his contentious penalty-hit performance in Brazil. It’s his longest podium drought since the first five races of last season.
Norris has outscored him a devastating 97-42 in that time, and there’s red ink spilt in every key metric relative to his teammate.
The qualifying pace that proved fundamental to his early-campaign strengths has been totally wiped.
One-lap average
Australia to Italy: Piastri 0.042 seconds faster
Azerbaijan onwards: Norris 0.245 seconds faster
That’s resulted in him taking the two worst qualifying results of his season — ninth in Azerbaijan, eighth in Mexico — to drag down his average.
Average qualifying result
Australia to Italy: Piastri 1.0 place ahead (2.1 vs. 3.1)
Azerbaijan onwards: Norris 2.8 places ahead (3.2 vs. 6.0)
While on average he’s finished higher than he’s started, not only his average race result is down, but he’s now finishing a long way behind Norris.
Average race result
Australia to Italy: Piastri 0.5 places ahead (2.5 vs. 2.9)
Azerbaijan onwards: Norris 3.0 places ahead (1.8-4.8)
That’s had a commensurate effect on his score rate relative to his teammate, underpinning the rapid reversal in their championship fortunes.
Average score
Australia to Italy: Piastri 2.0 points up (20.3 vs. 18.3 points)
Azerbaijan onwards: Norris 11.0 points up (19.4 vs. 8.4)
It’s not just relative to Norris either. Piastri has lost ground to almost every other frontrunning driver.
Points since Italian Grand Prix, frontrunners
1. Max Verstappen: 111 points
2. Lando Norris: 97 points
3. George Russell: 82 points
4. Andrea Kimi Antonelli: 56 points
5. Charles Leclerc: 51 points
6. Oscar Piastri: 42 points
7. Lewis Hamilton: 31 points
8. Yuki Tsunoda: 16 points
Losing 69 points to Verstappen means Piastri is now just 25 points ahead of the Dutchman, almost exactly the same distance he is behind Norris.
Piastri finishes 5th after crash chaos | 03:20
WHERE DID IT ALL GO WRONG?
While the season isn’t over yet, the cause of Piastri’s sharp downturn is already being dissected.
It would be convenient to say the Australian is feeling the pressure of the title fight, but it’s a theory that simply doesn’t fit.
Why, for example, would he suddenly tense up in Azerbaijan, a circuit at which he’s performed so strongly in the past, when his title lead was so comfortable? Why not immediately after the mid-season break, when the focus was more sharply on him versus Norris?
It also doesn’t explain his performance in Singapore, where he outqualified Norris on a track at which his teammate has historically had the upper hand, nor his improved race performance in Brazil.
Instead there’s a combination of elements that have worked together to hold Piastri back.
The first is undeniably a pair of poor performances that cost him considerably.
Piastri has never been at his competitive best in Austin and Mexico City. Historically they’re weak circuits — and historically they’re strong venues for Norris.
In previous seasons his relative weakness at these tracks has been related to his general lack of experience with Pirelli’s sensitive tyres. This year he’s made considerable gains on that front — he’s won at several of his previous weak tracks — but that’s served to expose a more deeply seated struggle not as evident previously.
Piastri’s driving style is great at exploiting peak grip from the tyres via a high minimum apex speed, but he struggles to feel comfortable when the track is low on grip and the car has to slide to be fast.
Both Austin and Mexico City are low-grip tracks, ensuring they remained vulnerable rounds for the Australian even in his title-contending season.
He lost 23 points and the title lead over these two weekends, leaving him suddenly vulnerable.
Classy Piastri congratulates Norris | 00:37
THE FIELD IS MORE COMPETITIVE
These tracks couldn’t have turned up at a worse time for Piastri, and not just because we’re heading towards the crunch moment in the championship.
The field is closer than it was at the start of the year, and Norris is also more competitive.
The field spread in qualifying in Brazil was the tightest of the season, with just 0.528 seconds separating the top 10 drivers in Q3 and with all 10 teams separated by just 0.892 seconds. It meant Piastri’s lacklustre final lap of the session put him behind not only Norris but Andrea Kimi Antonelli and Charles Leclerc as well.
Consider that before the mid-season break, when McLaren had the run of things, Piastri outqualified Norris by 0.2 seconds or more four times but never started any of those races lower than seventh on the grid and never finished lower than third.
Piastri, on the other hand, has been outqualified by more than 0.2 seconds at the last three grands prix but finished fifth each time.
Consider too that Piastri was also forced to serve a 10-second penalty at the British Grand Prix but comfortably finished second, whereas in Brazil he could do no better than fifth.
What’s also changed is that Norris is punishing Piastri regularly.
Whereas earlier in the year Norris rarely capitalised on Piastri’s mistakes — think back even to as recently as Azerbaijan, where he gained only six points on the worst weekend of Piastri’s Formula 1 career — now he’s causing maximum pain.
In the United States he was second behind runaway leader Max Verstappen. In Mexico he dominated the grand prix. In Brazil he won both the sprint and the grand prix, both from pole.
Norris has undoubtedly improved. Whether it’s simply taken him time to get 100 per cent comfortable with the car this season, whether it’s because he felt the pressure release after his Zandvoort DNF or whether it’s because he’s found a better mental approach in the mid-season break, he isn’t as easily contained as he was in the first part of the season.
Take qualifying in Brazil as an example. When he made a mistake on his first lap of Q3 as Piastri took provisional pole, it looked a lot like a page out of the form guide of the first few months of the year. Unlike that earlier version of Norris, however, he rebounded, storming to pole position in tricky conditions.
The result was the first clean sweep weekend of his career — sprint pole and victory, grand prix pole and victory. It was also only the second time in his career he’s won back-to-back grands prix, the first having been when he inherited the lead from the penalised Piastri at the British Grand Prix.
The Englishman has all the momentum, and he’s making the most of the chances it’s bringing him.
“Oh my god!” Norris on Piastri crash | 00:11
WHEN IT RAINS, IT POURS
There’s an additional crucial element, though it’s more less tangible, that’s clearly at play here.
Momentum isn’t just with Norris. Right now it feels like it’s against Piastri.
Let’s take Brazil as one example.
This was the circuit that was supposed to return him to competitiveness, and at first he appeared to be right on the pace, even after a narrow sprint qualifying defeat.
His chance to convert, however, was undone by a spin into the barriers while pursuing Antonelli for second place.
He’d stepped onto the kerb at the exit of turn 2 on the previous lap; the difference was that just moments before doing so again on lap 6, Norris had run slightly wider over the rumble strip and kicked up some pooled rainwater.
Piastri admitted that riding the kerbs in slippery conditions was a risk he chose to take. But Nico Hülkenberg and Franco Colapinto were also caught out just moments later in similar fashions, demonstrating how difficult Norris’s car had made the conditions.
Race organisers later that night cut grooves into the kerbs to stop water from pooling, preventing the same thing happening again — talk about timing.
By then Piastri had qualified a distant fourth for the grand prix in unexpectedly low-grip conditions.
Overnight storms, high winds, cool temperatures, harder tyres and the diamond-cut grooves combined to make the circuit slippery.
The result was that none of the top 14 drivers was able to put together their best three sectors in qualifying in a sign of just how tough the track was.
McLaren had also been forced to make some set-up changes after the sprint — the car was raised to protect the floor from the bumps and undulation — that appeared to put it slightly outside Piastri’s comfort zone.
The Australian was punchy early, making that bold move for second place on Antonelli. He made it through without damage only to be pinged with a draconian 10-second time penalty for causing a collision despite paddock consensus suggesting it should have been considered a racing incident.
From there McLaren put him on what turned out to be a suboptimal strategy — as opposed to, say, Norris lucking into the perfect strategy in Hungary, when he’d also found himself detached from the leaders — that left him fifth.
Piastri reacts after disastrous crash | 00:46
It was galling considering Piastri had pace in his final two stints — after ditching his flat-spotted first set of mediums — to go with Norris. Second place should have been comfortably achievable.
These add up to a mighty chapter in the mythical book of driver excuses for poor results, but it’s also a sobering demonstration of how momentum can work against you. When it rains, it pours.
They add on to several other minor incidents or 50-50 moments that have swung against him in recent rounds.
There were the team orders in Italy, worth a swing of six points against him.
Then there was the lack of team orders in Singapore, worth another six-point swing, that the team retrospectively admitted should have been addressed in race according to its internal racing rules.
The late deployment of the virtual safety car in Mexico City that cost him his last chances to pass Oliver Bearman for fourth, worth two more points, can fall into this category too.
“It’s just very, very fine margins and tough moments and things that could easily go either way that are creating big consequences at the moment,” Piastri lamented, per ESPN.
A campaign running to 24 rounds is so long that the list of sliding-doors moments is too long to detail and not worth considering. Luck comes in swings and roundabouts
But the seemingly immutable law of momentum in sport means that Piastri’s poor form has been punished with poor fortune as well at the worst possible moment.
It’s up to Piastri to break the cycle before he runs out of time.
