The McLarenisation of Oscar Piastri

His hindsight is my foresight. That’s how Oscar Piastri describes his relationship with his manager Mark Webber, the former Red Bull F1 driver.

But what can Webber do to help Piastri get his F1 2025 title challenge back on track, having seen a 34-point lead turn into a deficit of 24 with three races to go? The answer may be disarmingly simple.

The best thing Mark Webber can say to Oscar Piastri

A version of this article originally appeared in PlanetF1.com’s conclusions from the 2025 Brazilian Grand Prix

Just focus on yourself.

If there is anyone in the paddock who will appreciate the wisdom behind those four little words, it is surely Mark Webber.

It was on that score, after all, that his own title challenge crumbled back in 2010.

It was Webber’s determination to keep up with Sebastian Vettel in the rain in Korea, rather than hold back and bank the points for second place, that lured him into a mistake he must still regret to this day.

Three weeks later at the title decider in Abu Dhabi, Webber and Fernando Alonso were so busy eyeing each other that they failed to recognise the threat of Vettel, the outsider whose victory brought with it the championship and left the pair of them in disbelief.

Oscar Piastri vs Lando Norris: McLaren head-to-head scores for F1 2025

👉 F1 2025: Head-to-head qualifying statistics between team-mates

👉 F1 2025: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates

When Oscar Piastri’s late-season slump started in Baku, this column made a great deal of the role Webber – very much the Jos to Oscar’s Max Verstappen – had to play in order to help his driver recover quickly.

Yet what does that mean in real terms? How can Webber possibly halt the slide?

What is it that Mark can say to stop those walls closing in?

Just focus on yourself.

For much of this season, Piastri’s use of the data has been described as a great virtue in his battle with Lando Norris.

Often Lando would establish an early pace advantage at the start of a weekend and Oscar would go away, study the data, absorb and apply the lessons to his own technique and gradually chip away at the gap across the remaining practice sessions.

Until he was right there with him – or at least close enough to capitalise when Norris tensed up – when it really mattered in Q3.

It has served him well until now, yet the last few races have perhaps revealed the shortcomings of his approach.

Take, for instance, his less eye-catching mistakes from the Brazilian Grand Prix weekend, notably those two lockups into Turn 1 on his first flying laps of sprint and main qualifying.

Irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, you might say. Certainly compared to his accident in the sprint race and his penalty for causing a collision at the safety car restart in the main event.

But potentially more instructive when it comes to establishing where exactly Piastri has been going so wrong lately.

Might it be that those identical errors in SQ1 and Q1 stemmed from Oscar noticing he was losing time to Norris at that corner, seeing what Lando was doing with the steering and the brakes, trying to replicate it and finding out that it was beyond him?

If so, maybe what we are really witnessing here is the McLarenisation of Oscar Piastri and the dangers of being consumed by a data-driven approach.

Just take a look at Daniel Ricciardo’s McLaren career to understand how focusing too heavily on the data can result in a gifted racing driver losing what made him such a vibrant natural talent in the first place before the team’s tentacles took hold.

Put another way, if Piastri allows himself to be moulded into a Norris clone, he will find himself merely doing what Lando does behind the wheel.

Only less naturally.

And therefore less effectively.

Hence, maybe, why Piastri is less equipped than a driver of his quality really should be to cope with the low-grip conditions he was confronted with in Austin and Mexico recently.

It is here, most of all, where Webber can make his impact felt.

Insisting that the data is used only to inform, not lead. Becoming a wedge between the driver and the team’s worst instincts.

Getting Oscar Piastri back to being Oscar Piastri – driving instinctively and without constantly fretting about what Norris is doing with throttle application here and the brake pressure there – for the final three races of 2025 and beyond.

That, you suspect, is the way out of this.

In other words, Oscar, the time has come to just focus on yourself.

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