Oscar Piastri still not thinking clearly as Norris and Verstappen close in

Oscar Piastri held a 34-point lead over McLaren driver Lando Norris and a 104-point advantage over Max Verstappen following his most recent victory of the F1 2025 season at the Dutch Grand Prix.

Four races later, Norris and Verstappen are 14 and 40 points behind respectively. Can Piastri handle the pressure across the last five races?

Can Oscar Piastri get back on track before it’s too late?

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

It is never a wise move to try a switchback at the first corner on the opening lap at the Circuit of the Americas.

How do we know this? Rewind to Austin 2022.

Carlos Sainz was in the process of trying exactly that against Max Verstappen that day.

Yet just as he was starting to think about getting a run on the Red Bull on the downhill approach to the esses, he was spun around and into retirement by George Russell.

George, of course, took the penalty that afternoon and deservedly so.

Yet by trying a move so risky at that stage of the race, Carlos had put himself in a position of maximum vulnerability.

It was naive of him, especially on such a wide circuit, to assume that a driver behind would not fill such an inviting gap on the inside.

It was one thing for Sainz, a driver prone to those sort of misjudgements and free to take risks without the pressures of a title fight hanging over him, to make such a move.

Quite another for Oscar Piastri, after the bruising experience of recent races and with a lead of 22 points to protect entering the United States Grand Prix weekend, to leave himself so exposed to misfortune.

Study the replays of the start of Saturday’s sprint race in Austin and there is a moment, as Lando Norris claims the inside of the corner, for Piastri to commit to the outside line, knowing the run-off area would be there if he needed it.

That would have been the safety-first move.

That his survival instinct did not kick in, that he instead chose the high-risk option with so many cars around him, was yet more evidence that Oscar is still not thinking clearly this side of Monza.

As noted in PlanetF1.com’s conclusions from the Singapore Grand Prix, it is no coincidence that Piastri has not been quite the same since Norris’s retirement at Zandvoort.

That was the moment the dynamic between the McLaren drivers changed: Norris suddenly with nothing to lose and Piastri suddenly having everything to lose.

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

Without Zandvoort, McLaren would not have been emboldened to ask Oscar to swap positions with Lando at Monza; Piastri probably would not have panicked in Baku; he may not have whined so much over team radio about a pretty innocuous move by his teammate in Singapore either.

And who knows? Without the bitter taste of Singapore, he might not have been quite so racy and determined to get one over Norris at the start of the Austin sprint.

Of greater concern to Piastri, perhaps, is the pace deficit between himself and Norris at the Circuit of the Americas, consistently hovering at around 0.3s – sometimes smaller, sometimes larger – across both qualifying sessions on Friday and Saturday.

Maybe this was just one of those weekends Norris is capable of from time to time, blowing his teammate away at a circuit where he has performed well (and Piastri has struggled) in the past and revelling in the extra feel offered by the upgraded front suspension he first ran in Canada.

And it did not help Piastri – so adept at applying the lessons from the data across the three practice sessions on a standard race weekend – that this happened to be a sprint event, denying him the opportunity to gradually chip away at the gap on Friday and Saturday.

Yet Norris’s comfortable advantage over him in the United States will only add to the doubts threatening to derail Piastri’s season.

The only silver lining?

If Verstappen – the winner of three of the last four races – keeps this up, soon enough McLaren will be forced to abandon its policy of total fairness and throw its full support behind one driver.

If (when?) that time comes, Piastri must make sure the high ground still belongs to him.

Expect Mark Webber to be pushing for that decision to be made before it’s too late.

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