The way Oscar Piastri lost the Formula 1 world championship lead means he may have grown complacent, Jacques Villeneuve has suggested.
Piastri led the standings for 15 consecutive rounds, with his advantage reaching 34 points over McLaren team-mate Lando Norris and 104 points over Max Verstappen after his Dutch Grand Prix win.
Since then, the Australian has suffered a spate of mediocre results, with Mexico marking a fourth consecutive podium-less race. Norris consequently snatched the lead away by one point, with Verstappen just 35 further points in arrears.
While Norris’ supreme Mexican GP win was hailed as a sign of the Briton’s performance reaching Piastri’s level, the 1997 world champion sees things differently.
“You see it in every sport,” Villeneuve told Sky Sports’ F1 Show podcast. “You have teams that will have an average season. You get closer and closer to the finals, to the playoffs, and suddenly, they're the best team out there. Why, for what reason? They were average all season. And teams that have been winning every game, they collapse at that. It happens all the time.
“We didn't have an extremely fantastic Lando early in the season. Not the Lando we had at the end of last year. And we kept saying, ‘Oh, that's because, you know, Piastri has stepped up. He's now on Lando's pace, and even quicker.’
“But was it actually Piastri stepping up, or Lando that just wasn't on it? He kept saying he wasn't very comfortable with the car. And maybe that made Piastri complacent a bit. When all you have to fight is your team-mate, maybe you don't push to that last limit, that last tenth of a second.
“Suddenly, we get Baku, and we get Max that's winning everything. And Lando stepped up. Lando is driving faster and better than he's been all season. And Piastri is not stepping up. He was already at his limit.
“And when you do that, when you have to go that extra two tenths, suddenly you find problems in the cars that did not exist. You know, when you drive within the limit, the car's perfect. It's easy, you drive, you save your tires.
“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, because right now, we have the same car. It hasn't evolved that much, so there's no reason for it to be driven differently. Same tires, it's Pirellis. They don't change. Sometimes, they're softer, sometimes, they're not. The track is warmer, and so on. But there isn't that big of a difference.
“So it just takes your team-mate to step up a little bit, and you're realising, ‘Oh, how do I do that?’ And suddenly, nothing works. It gets in your head, and you just get slower and slower and slower, and you start inventing set-ups that don't exist. You start doubting your way of driving. You look at the data, and you say, ‘Oh, my team-mate is one tenth quicker in that corner, I need to drive differently’, and that's when it goes wrong. You have to remember what you were doing that was good and just step up a little bit.”
To some extent, Villeneuve’s analysis is corroborated by Piastri’s own Mexico GP drive, with the McLaren driver explaining that he experimented with his driving style.
“We certainly tried a lot of different things,” Piastri explained. “I felt like I stared at the back of a lot of cars as well, so it was difficult to get a read on whether what I was changing in my driving was working that well or not.”
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