Oscar Piastri and His Season in Formula One

In the thin, high-altitude air of Mexico City, under a sky bruised purple by the setting sun, Lando Norris crossed the finish line 30 seconds ahead of the chasing pack. It was October 26, 2025, and the McLaren driver had just claimed a dominant victory in the Mexico Grand Prix.

–by Mark Cipolloni–

From pole position, he’d orchestrated a masterclass in tire management, fending off the Ferraris with surgical precision. But as the cameras panned to the second McLaren on track, the story took a darker turn. Oscar Piastri, the Australian prodigy who’d spent most of the year perched atop the drivers’ championship, limped home in fifth place—42 seconds adrift of his teammate, battling back from an eighth-place start against a pair of Mercedes that felt like concrete walls in his path.

Lando Norris of Great Britain driving the (4) McLaren MCL39 Mercedes on track during practice ahead of the F1 Grand Prix of Mexico at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez on October 24, 2025 in Mexico City, Mexico. (Photo by Hector Vivas/Getty Images for McLaren) — Lando Norris of Great Britain driving the (4) McLaren MCL39 Mercedes on track during the F1 Grand Prix of Mexico at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez on October 26, 2025 in Mexico City, Mexico. (Photo by Hector Vivas/Getty Images for McLaren)

It wasn’t supposed to end like this. Just four months earlier, in the scorching heat of Jeddah, Piastri had seized the championship lead with a pole-to-flag masterstroke, outqualifying Norris by three-tenths and extending his advantage to 23 points. He’d racked up four wins to Norris’s two in the opening half of the season, his cool-headed precision turning McLaren’s MCL39 into a weapon of mathematical dominance.

Fans dubbed him “The Calculator,” a nod to his unflappable style that seemed tailor-made for the papaya car’s razor-sharp handling. Norris, the affable Brit with the megawatt smile, had been the one playing catch-up, his qualifying woes costing him dearly as Piastri built a fortress at the top. By the Italian Grand Prix in September, Piastri’s lead stood at a comfortable 31 points, and whispers of a first-time champion from Down Under filled the paddock. McLaren, the resurgent British squad, was on the cusp of its first constructors’ title since 1998, powered by a duo that promised harmony in orange.

Then, like a tire puncture in the dead of night, it unraveled. Back-to-back weekends in Austin and Mexico exposed cracks in Piastri’s armor. In the United States Grand Prix, he qualified a distant sixth, 0.4 seconds off Norris’s pace, and finished fourth after a scrappy recovery drive marred by oversteer and a “weird” power unit glitch in Turn 5 that left him questioning the car’s soul.

Mexico was worse: a 0.588-second qualifying deficit in Q3, the largest of his career against a teammate, dropping him to eighth before a penalty to Carlos Sainz bumped him up one spot. Piastri’s lap times told a tale of quiet desperation—losing time in every sector, from the heavy-braking plunge into Turn 1 to the slippery stadium section where his rear tires overheated like a kettle on boil. “Everything feels normal, but the gap was big all weekend,” he admitted post-qualifying, his voice steady but edged with frustration. “It’s a bit of a mystery.”

McLaren’s brain trust, led by the unflappable Andrea Stella, wasted no time in offering a diagnosis. It wasn’t sabotage or a faulty chassis, they insisted—no “major problems” with the car, no hidden gremlins unearthed by data dives or monocoque swaps. Instead, blame fell to the invisible alchemy of man and machine.

Race winner Lando Norris of Great Britain and McLaren Andrea Stella, Team Principal of McLaren and Oscar Piastri of Australia and McLaren celebrate during the F1 Grand Prix of Mexico at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez on October 26, 2025 in Mexico City, Mexico. (Photo by Andy Hone/LAT Images for McLaren)

The Mexico circuit’s low-grip surface, baked by hot tarmac and worn Pirellis, demanded a driving style Piastri hadn’t yet mastered: aggressive slides, late braking into chaos, and a willingness to dance on the edge of the rear axle. Norris, ever the showman, thrived there. “Lando is the driver of going on low grip,” Stella explained, his Italian accent cutting through the post-session scrum.

“Oscar is more of a driver of high grip. That’s where he can exploit this incredible talent.” Piastri himself echoed the sentiment a day later, dropping a bombshell admission: he needed a “major” overhaul in his approach for the final four races. “Change how I was driving,” he said bluntly, acknowledging that the MCL39’s evolution into the grid’s fastest car required him to adapt or perish.

Setup tweaks played their part too. Since Canada, Norris had been running a revised front suspension geometry that sharpened his front-end bite, banishing the qualifying jitters that plagued him earlier in the year. It added tenths to his one-lap speed, turning him into a qualifying demon—outpacing Piastri in each of the last five rounds.

Piastri, stubborn in his faith in the original spec, held out, convinced it offered no edge. Now, with the title slipping away, whispers in the garage suggest a switch—or even a chassis change for psychological reset—looms on the horizon, though McLaren treads carefully to avoid stoking the favoritism fire.

But for every engineer with a telemetry printout, there was a fan with a conspiracy. As Piastri’s slump deepened, the X timelines and Reddit threads ignited with fury. “Sabotage,” they cried, pointing to his Mexico woes as proof of a tampered car—perhaps a detuned engine mode or a suspension sabotaged in the shadows of Woking.

The theory gained oxygen when Mario Andretti, the 1978 champion and eternal paddock provocateur, waded in on a podcast: “McLaren’s favoring Lando because he’s British. Oscar’s getting the short end—calm, calculated, but not one of ‘them’.”

Pundits piled on; a fiery Daily Mail column branded it outright “shafting,” arguing Piastri’s Aussie roots made him an outsider in a team steeped in Union Jack pride. Boos rained down on Norris’s Mexico podium, a toxic echo of the sport’s tribal underbelly, fueled by memories of Monza weeks earlier: a sluggish five-second pit stop for Norris that forced Piastri to yield position mid-race, per team orders, narrowing the Australian’s lead by precious points.

McLaren’s past lent credence to the whispers. The team has a checkered ledger of intra-team favoritism, etched in the scars of drivers like Spaniard Fernando Alonso, who endured Ron Dennis’s golden-child treatment of Lewis Hamilton (a British driver)—subtle strategy calls, radio nudges, and the quiet erosion of a Spaniards title dreams. Fast-forward to 2024: the Hungarian Grand Prix saw Norris reluctantly swap back with Piastri after a strategic undercut, a one-two sealed but egos bruised.

Brazil’s sprint yielded another favor, Piastri gifting Norris the win to “balance the scales.” And in 2025’s British GP, Piastri’s plea for a position swap after a dubious penalty fell on deaf ears, handing Norris the victory.

Critics like Edd Straw of The Race decried these as “Papaya Rules” gone awry—McLaren’s code for fair racing twisted into a shield for their homegrown hero. Even Zak Brown, the team’s charismatic CEO, faced ghosts from a 2023 court spat with IndyCar’s Alex Palou, who alleged Brown confessed Piastri wasn’t the “chosen one” for a seat. Brown called it “ludicrous,” but the seed was planted.

A befuddled Oscar Piastri at the 2025 Mexico City GP. Image supplied.

Yet, for every accusation, there’s a rebuttal etched in data. Sky Sports’ Ted Kravitz (a Brit) dismantled the bias narrative with cold logic: Piastri’s early-season dominance—outqualifying Norris, stealing poles, and surging to the lead—belied any grand plot. “Nationality? Seniority? It doesn’t stand up over a season,” he scoffed, noting McLaren’s multimillion-dollar poach of Piastri from Alpine as proof of equal investment.

Stella doubled down, ruling out car foul play after exhaustive checks: “Every piece of data tells us there’s no problem.” Piastri’s race engineer, Tom Stallard, pointed to Norris’s edge in braking zones and tire warm-up—nuances of talent, not treachery. And in a paddock where whispers travel faster than a DRS zone, no whistleblower has emerged. As one insider put it, “If they were nobbling Oscar, we’d know by now.”

As the circus rolls to Interlagos for Brazil’s sprint showdown on November 10, Piastri stands one point behind Norris in the title chase, with Max Verstappen lurking 36 points adrift but Red Bull’s resurgence a gathering storm. The Australian has four races to recalibrate: tweak the setup, rewrite his driving script, and silence the doubters. Will it be a tale of redemption, or the latest chapter in McLaren’s storied saga of brotherly betrayal?

In Formula 1, where alliances shatter on the straights, only the laps will tell. For now, the papaya kingdom simmers, its throne contested not just by speed, but by shadows of suspicion.