With four rounds to go in the 2025 Formula 1 world championship, Oscar Piastri will have to confirm he can overcome his late season slump as he battles Lando Norris for the world title.
After Norris' calamitous retirement in Zandvoort, Piastri's lead ballooned to 34 points, meaning a drama-free end to the season for Piastri would have made it extremely difficult for Norris to come back. Piastri's poise and consistency made a comeback for his team-mate feel like a left-field scenario.
But coinciding with Max Verstappen entering the title debate with a resurgent Red Bull, Norris has hit his stride and taken over from Piastri as McLaren's in-form driver. That in itself wouldn't have been a huge issue for Piastri given his points lead, but a costly DNF in Baku after a messy, crash-filled weekend was followed by two off-kilter weekends in Austin and Mexico where the Australian was genuinely off the pace all weekend.
Meanwhile, Norris delivered his best qualifying lap of the season in Mexico and went on to win by a huge 30-second margin, taking the championship lead from his team-mate by one point.
It led to a spate of theories from fans and pundits, some more outlandish than others, that the otherwise unflappable Piastri was cracking under the pressure, or that there was something wrong with his chassis. Or even that McLaren would somehow sabotage one of its two cars capable of defeating Verstappen to claim its first double world championship win since 1998, after having gone through all that trouble to treat both Norris and Piastri as equal number ones.
McLaren's explanation was a more prosaic, technical one - Piastri's issues were down to the low-grip circuits of Austin and Mexico and the way the quick but difficult-to-drive MCL39 needed to be handled in those conditions.
"It was good to prove that it was the fastest car," Stella said after the Mexico GP. "But the fastest car is also a car that needs to be driven in a certain way, especially when you have conditions like here and to some extent in Austin, with hot tarmac, sliding tyres, and the way in which you generate lap time is a way that comes relatively naturally for Lando and less naturally for Oscar.
"At the same time, we don't have to forget that while we talk about the leader in the drivers' championship, he's not even finished the third season in Formula 1, so experiencing situations like we have [in Mexico] and Austin is how you actually calibrate yourself as a driver. Every session, Oscar is learning a little bit as to what you need to do."
He added: "Oscar should be very proud of himself of how he has handled it. We could see in the race that he was applying this."
Somewhat oversimplifying it, Piastri needed to embrace the fact that sliding the car wasn't a sign he was doing things wrong. Counterintuitively, it was actually required to wring those final tenths out of his machine, like Norris had been able to do.
Piastri said it was tough to understand how the tidier, on-rails driving style that had made him a world title frontrunner suddenly stopped working for two races. "For some reason, the last couple of weekends has required a very different way of driving, and what's worked well for me in the last 19 races has needed something very different the last couple of weekends," he debriefed after the North American double-header.
"Trying to wrap my head around why has been a bit of a struggle, but ultimately [the race] was about trying to experiment with some of those things. Driving the way I've had to drive these last couple of weekends is not particularly natural for me, so it's been about trying to exploit it as much as I can."
Stella categorically ruled out that Piastri's form curve had anything to do with his forced chassis change after he damaged his original one in Baku. "Every evidence, every piece of data, every indirect measurement of information we have tells us that there is no problem with the car, and we have no reason to suspect that that's the case," the Italian explained.
"I know that in the history of F1 there is this topic of changing the chassis. I would change other components than the chassis, like the floor, the front wing, but in reality there is a rotation of parts, so it's not like there is always the same parts on the car. So we have reasons to be reassured that there is no problem with the car."
What McLaren did prove to itself in Mexico is that it still has a car that can win and even dominate races. It always believed as much, but that confidence understandably received a bit of a knock after being beaten by Verstappen at circuits where it dominated in 2024, like Singapore. Norris' Mexico performance has therefore come as a relief, and gave team boss Stella "more confidence" that it can halt Verstappen's march to a fifth title over the remaining four rounds than he had before the weekend - even if the Dutchman is now 36 points behind McLaren's leader driver rather than 40.
But starting from this weekend's sprint event in Sao Paulo, Piastri also has something to prove - McLaren's theory that his slump was largely track dependent. "In the final four races, there's no reason to think that one may favour one driver or the other," Stella insisted.
"For Lando and Oscar, there's no problem in terms of track layout coming in the next four races. If anything, we need to make sure that we are in condition to extract the full performance that is available in the car, like we have been able to do in Mexico [unlike previous races].
"Even if he lost some points to Verstappen, I think Oscar has got a lot of learning from this weekend. And that's an investment that you make to make sure that you are competitive in every condition in the final part of the season. So overall, we come out of this weekend encouraged and optimistic."
To both keep his title bid on the rails and restore his own confidence in the car, Piastri would do well to stop the rot at the very first opportunity, and get at least close to Norris starting at Interlagos this weekend.
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