Oscar Piastri’s tough run of form stretching back to September’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix, during which he’s seen McLaren team-mate Lando Norris obliterate what was previously a very healthy championship lead, has prompted many difficult questions since Norris dominated Formula 1’s Mexican GP while Piastri toiled to fifth.
Piastri himself called his alarming lack of pace in Mexico a “mystery”, coming straight after a similarly tough weekend at Austin, during which he clattered into his team-mate in the sprint - having been himself a victim of a clattering from Norris at the previous race, and before that been the one clattering his own McLaren, to devastatingly heavy effect, into Baku’s unforgiving walls.
So what to make of things when a driver cannot explain why he suddenly cannot perform anything like as well as he was doing previously, in a car that hasn’t ostensibly changed since well before he started stinking up the place so unexpectedly?
The lack of immediate answers prompts inevitable conspiracy theories: McLaren wants Norris to win the title more than it wants Piastri to win it; McLaren has stopped its drivers sharing data between their cars now the constructors’ championship is sealed; McLaren is favouring Norris with its so-called sacrosanct ‘racing principles’ - without which Piastri would have more points than he does now and would still be leading the standings heading into the final four races.
With regards to how he’s being treated inside the team, Piastri still maintains he respects McLaren’s intent to allow both its drivers to fight each other for the championship to the bitter end - a principle team CEO Zak Brown has said he’s prepared to lose the title over if needs be.
Piastri says McLaren encourages its drivers to “stand up for ourselves” behind the scenes and doesn’t feel anything needs to change.
He was even directly asked about Brazilian F1 fans feeling McLaren is sabotaging his title challenge, to which Piastri replied: “There’s questions on why some differences have cropped up in terms of how I need to drive, but everything is explainable. So there’s definitely none of that going on."
Instead of indulging conspiracies, Piastri has done is what all self-respecting F1 drivers do after a bad race or two: analyse.
And that analysis points to what he calls “pretty clear answers” and “not really too many mysteries on what’s happened”.
Piastri has identified the Pirelli tyre allocation for recent races - which has leaned towards having two compounds at the softer end of the range and then two steps on for the hard tyre - plus the way teams and drivers have had to use those tyre allocations, as a key reason for his drop-off.
Baku, where teams burned up their softest tyres in practice and couldn’t easily decide whether the soft or medium was better for qualifying, Piastri simply writes off as a “messy weekend” where “the pace was pretty good, I was just trying a bit too hard in the end”.
But at Austin and in Mexico there was a definite lack of pace, which team principle Andrea Stella ascribed to a difference in driving styles between Piastri and Norris - ostensibly that Norris is more comfortable when the grip level is lower, the tyres are more prone to overheating and sliding, and the fast corners and braking zones cannot be attacked so easily.
Piastri still seems honestly a little stumped as to why driving in a way that worked so well for him previously suddenly didn’t work at all. His best working theory is that the way the tyres have interacted with these two particularly difficult track surfaces has required a much greater level of driving adjustment than was the case when similar conditions presented themselves earlier in the season.
After all, it’s true to say we’ve had hot and slippery races much earlier in this championship in which Piastri didn’t appear to struggle at all.
Piastri says he was adjusting his driving at those places, but not to anything like the degree that was required by the particular demands of Austin and Mexico.
“Austin and Mexico are a bit different to quite a lot of other circuits we've been to, even just when you look at the tyre usage on both of those weekends,” Piastri explained.
“To have two weekends where the soft tyre is the tyre to be on in qualifying and the race is not that usual, and that has been a big difference from earlier in the season.
“I think it's just been in some circuits, maybe a corner or two, where you need to adapt to things like that and drive a bit differently, but the last couple of weekends it's been you've needed to drive differently all the time, in a way that I've not had to for the whole year.
“So just trying to understand more of what I need to shift to and how that feels has been the biggest kind of learning curve with that.”
This sounds like a driver, let’s not forget, who is only in his third season racing at this level, just getting found out a bit by a fundamental lack of experience, and perhaps underestimating the challenge of those two circuits slightly.
What hasn’t been addressed yet is whether the different configuration of front suspension Norris uses, introduced much earlier in the season to help Norris feel the car’s behaviour through the steering wheel more accurately but dismissed out of hand by Piastri, is playing a role here.
It’s always especially difficult for a driver to process why they’ve been slow when they feel like, in Piastri’s words, “I’ve executed reasonably well”. In this kind of situation the driver wants to feel more obviously like they’ve clearly done something wrong, and can properly sense what that thing is.
But for Piastri “the question as to why some things have not been working in the last couple of weekends and why some things have been, that part I’m not sure we’ll ever know the answer to”.
So Piastri has discovered what he calls "some evidence" but it doesn’t sound like he has all of the clues to the puzzle at this point.
Piastri also dismissed the mental shift of being the chaser rather than the chased in this title battle, because the points gap is negligible anyway, so he’ll be aiming to take the same sort of risks in the car he was taking before and in the meantime “just trying to make sure that however I need to drive, whatever the car needs, whatever the tyres need, that I’ve got the tools available to be able to adapt”.
“I think that’s been part of the struggle the last couple of weekends: what has been working for the majority of the season wasn’t working very well.”
That’s a tough place to be in, because it sounds like something quite fundamental rather than an easy fix. He also needs to be careful not to overcorrect and end up inadvertently throwing away things that were working for him before and may still prove useful.
The other thing to consider in all of this is the improvement made on the other side of the McLaren garage.
Some have suggested Norris is driving with more freedom since the oil pipe problem at Zandvoort that left him suddenly trailing Piastri by 34 points.
Norris says there’s “maybe a couple of little decisions here and there” where he’s chosen to risk more in the car knowing he’s got less to lose, but “would put it more down to just having worked hard and having a very good team around me”.
“99% of it [is] down to that,” he added. “1% a mix of various different things. But most results coming from work done rather than a mentality [shift].”
That said, Norris does concede he’s worked hard on improving his mentality. Earlier this season, when he was on a bad run of form, questions were asked of his emotional control as he repeatedly lambasted himself publicly for making mistakes at key moments - such as shunting in Q3 in Saudi Arabia or failing to take pole in Bahrain.
Since winning in Monaco in May, and absorbing that experience in a more considered way than people perhaps expected, it’s been clear that Norris has been at pains to exhibit the sort of emotional control in and around his car that three-time world champion Jackie Stewart has always said is the key to being truly successful in motor racing.
Norris doesn’t carry his baggage with him in quite the same way now. He tries to treat his good and bad days with an even handedness that was probably lacking before, and tries to make sure he leaves his job behind him when it’s done rather than obsessing endlessly about the ‘what-ifs’ that can be asked after every F1 event.
“Mentality is improved, approach is improved, preparation is improved,” Norris confirmed. “All of that has improved because of doing more work and working harder and spending more time trying to understand things.
“I certainly feel like I can deal with a lot more now than what I was doing at the beginning of the season, but I was also dealing with a lot more difficulties at the beginning of season than I am now.
“I always say I'm in a much better space than I was back then for many different reasons.
"Do I wish I could have changed some things? Maybe, but would I be as good now as if I didn’t learn those things back then? Probably not.
“It’s all part of learning. I certainly think my mentality and just general emotion has gone down. I think that’s a good thing for me.”
