Why Oscar Piastri’s title hopes imploded in ‘combination of factors’

Seemingly cruising to the title with a seventh win of the F1 2025 season in Zandvoort, Oscar Piastri went winless in the latter part of the championship and dropped to third place in the Drivers’ standings.

Former Alpine executive director Marcin Budkowski believes several factors were in play, including the “mental aspects” that Piastri appeared immune to in the first part of the season.

The ‘combination of factors’ that cost Oscar Piastri a maiden title

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Three seasons into his fledgling Formula 1 career, Piastri looked to be on course for a maiden World title as he romped to a 34-point lead over Lando Norris at the Dutch Grand Prix.

It was the Australian racer’s seventh win in 15 races, Piastri seemingly unflappable as he pulled clear of Norris and put 104 points between himself and reigning World Champion, Max Verstappen.

Zandvoort, though, proved to be Piastri’s last win, with the McLaren driver managing just three podiums in the final nine races of the championship. He fell from P1 to P3, finishing the season 13 points down on newly-crowned champion Norris and 11 behind Verstappen.

Lando Norris v Oscar Piastri: McLaren 2025 head-to-head scores

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

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

Much has been said about Piastri’s late-season dip in form, which McLaren team principal Andrea Stella put down to the characteristics of the tracks as Piastri struggled in low-grip conditions.

But that, reckons Budkowski, was just one factor.

Speaking on the RacingNews365 podcast, Budkowski said: “It’s difficult to say. I think it’s a combination of factors — the technical reasons, the grip, and the fact that his driving style is more or less suited to certain circuits, track conditions, and the way the car behaves.

“Because at the end of the day, it’s always a mix between the driver’s style and how you extract performance from the car.”

The 48-year-old went on to claim that one factor behind Piastri’s slump was the mental stamina required in a title challenge, something that the McLaren driver appeared immune to earlier in the season.

“I also think there were some mental aspects involved,” he continued.

“Which is interesting, because in the first part of the season we were marvelling at such a young driver being so mentally strong, showing no emotions, and so on.

“I don’t want to say it was mental issues, because I don’t know that for a fact, but it feels like there was a mental element there — especially in Baku, with a spectacular mistake that wasn’t typical, a poor qualifying session, and the mistake during the race. That certainly didn’t help his confidence.”

As for Piastri, he previously hinted that McLaren’s team orders at Monza, where he was told to give second place back to Norris having overtaken him when McLaren fumbled the Briton’s pit stop, also played a role as it unsettled him heading into his crash-strewn Baku weekend.

“Ultimately [it’s] a combination of quite a few things,” Piastri told F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast. “Obviously, the race before that was Monza, which I didn’t feel was a particularly great weekend from my own performance and there was obviously what happened with the pit stops.

“But then also in Baku itself, Friday was tough, things weren’t working, I was overdriving, I wasn’t very happy with how I was driving and ultimately probably trying to make up for that a little bit on Saturday.

“I think there was kind of some things in the lead-up, let’s say, that were maybe not the most helpful and then things that happened on the weekend. We had an engine problem in FP1 that kind of unsettled things a bit, and then I was driving not that well. We were on C6 tyres [Pirelli’s new compound] that weekend, which are notoriously tricky to handle.

“There were just a lot of little things that eventually kind of added up.”

Although Norris is the title-holder, McLaren has already made it clear that the teammates will have “equal opportunity” this season to fight for the World title

“We’re constantly evolving as a racing team, but the fundamentals of having two drivers that we give equal opportunity to win, that won’t change,” McLaren CEO Zak Brown told PlanetF1.com and other accredited media in Abu Dhabi.

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