What’s going on with Oscar Piastri amid perplexing F1 title slump?

Martin Brundle has weighed in on Oscar Piastri’s late-season F1 title slump.

Piastri has seen a 34-point lead over McLaren teammate Lando Norris after the Dutch Grand Prix vanish and turn into a one-point deficit after a torrid run of form over the last few race weekends.

The Australian had a catastrophic weekend at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix as he crashed out of both qualifying and the race, and has been outscored by Norris at subsequent races in Singapore, the United States and Mexico.

After finishing fifth in Mexico City, where Norris claimed a dominant victory, Piastri conceded he has resorted to changing his driving style with his pace struggles continuing.

Analysing Piastri’s strange run on Sky Sports’ The F1 Show, Brundle said the damage has “been done quite a lot in the last few races”.

“Baku would have scattered his brain,” Brundle explained. “That was a very difficult weekend for him - twice in the barriers and a jump start. It seems to have gone off the rails.

“Without sitting down and talking to Oscar, it’s difficult to be fully accurate on this point. I’m sure McLaren are checking that chassis, the aerodynamics, the setup of that car ad infinitum.

“I really honestly believe that McLaren don’t mind which of their two drivers wins the world championship as long as it’s one of them and it’s not Max Verstappen. It’s super important to them.

“Something’s happened in Oscar’s head. Something’s just gone wrong and he’s lost a bit of confidence, and the way these cars go into corners and how close the competition is at the moment, you only need to be a touch off.

“He needs a very solid weekend. Has he got a lot going on in his ears? We described him as horizontal, and suddenly that facade seems to have gone from him, and he’s struggling.

“Rest assured, a team doesn’t spend $400m [£303m] a year and have 1,500 employees and try to make one of their cars go a little bit more slowly. His season early doors was so astonishing, you don’t suddenly forget how to do that.”

Is it more about Norris stepping up?

Sky Sports F1 pundit and 1997 world champion Jacques Villeneuve believes Piastri’s dip in form has coincided with improvements from Norris.

“You see it in every sport, a team that will have an average season, then you get closer to the finals or the playoffs and suddenly they are the best team out there,” Villeneuve said. “They were average all season. Teams that have been winning every game, they collapse at that point. It happens all the time.

“We didn’t have an extremely fantastic Lando earlier in the season. Not the Lando we had at the end of last year. And we kept saying, ‘oh because Piastri has stepped up he’s now at Lando’s pace and even quicker’.

“Was it actually Piastri stepping up, or Lando just not on it? He kept saying he wasn’t very comfortable with the car. Maybe that made Piastri complacent a bit. When all you have to fight is your teammate, maybe you don’t push to that last limit, that last tenth of a second.

“Suddenly we get to Baku and we get Max winning everything and Lando stepped up. Lando is driving faster and better than he has been all season, and Piastri is not stepping up, he was already at his limit.

“When you have to go that extra two tenths, suddenly you find problems in the car that didn’t exist. When you drive within the limit, the car is perfect and easy to drive, and suddenly you have to go a couple of tenths faster, you can’t drive the car anymore. Everything is wrong, you don’t know why.

“Right now we have the same car, it hasn’t evolved that much. There’s no reason for it to be driven differently. There isn’t that big of a difference. So it just takes your teammate to step up a little bit and you are thinking ‘oh how do I do that?’

“You drive tensed up, nothing works, it gets in your head and you just get slower and slower and slower and you start inventing stuff that doesn’t exist, you start doubting your driving, you look at the data and see your teammate is one tenth quicker in a corner and you think ‘I need to drive differently’ and that’s where it goes wrong.

“You have to remember what you were doing that was good and just step up a little bit.”