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Motorsport

Who slept worst last night: Oscar Piastri

Oscar Piastri Mark Webber Max Verstappen Sebastian Vettel McLaren Red Bull Christian Horner Lando Norris Baku Zak Brown

Oscar Piastri, as everyone knows by now, is not a man of many words. When he binned his McLaren on the very first lap of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, his race engineer asked over the radio "Oscar, are you okay?"; his reply was a calm "Yeah". Moments later, he was unplugged and out.

What was unusual, though, was that he didn’t head straight to the TV pen afterwards to face the journalists’ questions. Perhaps even the ever-cool Piastri found it a little too embarrassing to have messed up so badly. Instead, he grabbed a folding chair and a phone, settled down behind the fence at the crash site, and watched Max Verstappen chip away 25 points from his deficit.

Images Piastri will probably hope won’t be remembered as iconic at the end of the year. Because they’ll only become iconic if Turn 5 in Baku turns out to be where he lost the world championship.

What might have been going through his mind behind that fence? Perhaps he recalled his manager Mark Webber, who in 2010 arrived at the antepenultimate grand prix in Korea as the championship leader, only to spin out of second place in pouring rain – a mistake that effectively cost him the title.

The crashed car of Mark Webber, Red Bull Racing RB6 (Photo by: Motorsport Images)

There are parallels between 2025 Piastri and 2010 Webber. Both were facing their first real shot at becoming Formula 1 world champion. And in both cases, most experts had expected their respective team-mates to have the upper hand before the season started: Sebastian Vettel then, Lando Norris now.

But there is also a decisive difference. Fifteen years ago, good fortune helped Webber – now Piastri’s manager – lead the standings. Even though no one at Red Bull would say it out loud, both Christian Horner and Helmut Marko already sensed that Vettel would go on to have the more successful career.

Only time will tell who will prevail at McLaren, but Piastri has the self-confidence to rely on his own strengths – something Webber seemed to lack back then, when he even asked the team to focus its efforts on him, but Red Bull boss Dietrich Mateschitz flatly refused.

"At Red Bull there is no team order. The one who makes fewer mistakes and is faster will win," the Austrian said. And in the end, that wasn’t Webber, even though it once looked like he had one hand on the trophy. It was Vettel. His team's "Weltmeister" radio call at Abu Dhabi’s dramatic finale is still legendary today.

I remember Red Bull’s championship press conference at Hangar-7 on 16 November 2010. The brass band played for Vettel, the spotlight was all his, and even in the official Q&A Webber sat there ignored. I was in the audience and felt sorry for him.

I ended up being the first to ask Webber a question, because amid all the Vettel hype, nobody had noticed that the Australian had lost those crucial seconds during the pitstop phase stuck behind Jaime Alguersuari in the sister Toro Rosso car. The fact that someone noticed seemed to cheer him up briefly. Otherwise, he looked like a stranger at Vettel’s party. The suspicion that Red Bull might not have actively favored Vettel, but did love him just a little more, lingered. The Hangar-7 celebration did nothing to dispel it.

Chief technical officer Adrian Newey, Sebastian Vettel, Mark Webber and team principal Christian Horner (Photo by: Red Bull GmbH and GEPA pictures GmbH)

If Piastri secretly feels like McLaren’s number 1B, he hides it well. Many fans suspect McLaren CEO Zak Brown might prefer to see homegrown Norris as world champion — though there’s no evidence of that.

Even if Brown did harbor such a preference, it wouldn’t matter. McLaren’s 2025 "Papaya rules" under Andrea Stella are too professional and too transparent for favoritism. In the end, Zak most likely loves all the "men and women of McLaren" equally.

After his Baku mishap, Piastri didn’t look like a man whose mental armor had cracked. Norris had his Zandvoort (though not by his own fault), now Piastri has his Baku. Dust it off, move on. "I think it's rare that I have so many executional errors," the Australian said when he finally appeared in the TV pen. "So, very much focused on putting that behind me."

Stella’s fear that Verstappen might yet become a serious threat? I don’t share it. Sixty-nine points is still a hefty margin with only seven weekends to go. Yes, Red Bull was strong enough to win in Monza and Baku, but the odds of that continuing in Singapore, on a very different kind of circuit, are slim.

Verstappen can approach the remaining races with ease. He’ll show up at the Nurburgring next weekend to run another NLS race. He has no pressure. He’s already a world champion, and if 2025 doesn’t bring a fifth crown, no one will call it a missed opportunity. He can only win.

That, of course, is the opposite at McLaren – which is Verstappen’s only slim chance. Neither Norris nor Piastri know how it feels when nerves start to fray at the sharp end of a title fight – when you slip back in the standings, make another mistake and crash because you’re too eager to show that you can do better.

Oscar Piastri, McLaren (Photo by: Ozan Kose / AFP via Getty Images)

Baku was an outlier for Piastri. Two crashes in one weekend, plus a jump start on top, isn’t the 24-year-old’s norm. But let something else happen in Singapore — easy enough on a tight street circuit — and his mindset could quickly start to unravel.

Sixty-nine points is a comfortable cushion when you’ve got the fastest car. But cut that to 44, and Verstappen will smell blood — and he can be like a rottweiler once he does.

For Piastri, the key is to smother any flicker of hope at Red Bull, preferably with victory in Singapore. Because if he does, nobody will be talking about Baku anymore. And the likelihood that he’ll end the season one world championship up on his manager will be very, very high.