Damon Hill feels there’s only one possible ‘explanation’ for Oscar Piastri losing his way at McLaren

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Oscar Piastri was increasingly looking like the favourite to win the 2025 drivers’ title, but his persistent plight has now seen Lando Norris move atop the F1 championship.

Just one point separates McLaren teammates Norris and Piastri atop the standings with four rounds of the 2025 F1 season to play. Yet Piastri held a 34-point lead over Norris as recently as the end of August, when he also led Red Bull rival Max Verstappen in third by 104 points.

Those leads have now completely evaporated following a run of woe since the Dutch Grand Prix in round 15 of this year’s 24. Norris and Verstappen have both outscored Piastri in each of the past five rounds, having earned 82 and 116 points respectively to the Australian’s 47.

McLaren have even seen the previously bulletproof Piastri crash out of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, when he also jumped the start of the race and had crashed in qualifying. Piastri crashed into Norris in the COTA Sprint, too, and he was massively off the Briton’s pace in Mexico City.

Damon Hill’s ‘only explanation’ for Oscar Piastri’s struggles is that his mindset changed for the worse

For Damon Hill, there is only one possible explanation for why Piastri has lost his way, having taken seven Grand Prix wins and 13 podiums between rounds two and 15. The 1996 drivers’ champion fears Piastri has changed his mindset concerning the title fight, and for the worse.

READ MORE: McLaren driver Oscar Piastri’s life outside F1 from height to girlfriend

Piastri’s woe convinces Hill that the 24-year-old stopped taking the 2025 season race-by-race and started looking toward the prize at the end of the line. The Melbourne native could become the third Australian to win the F1 drivers’ championship, and the first to since 1980.

Hill told the Stay On Track podcast: “He had the luxury of a points advantage, and suddenly he drops the ball. Now, I remember Mark Webber saying this guy has not even lost so much as a corner, or done a corner on a car before. And he gets to Baku, and he does two tubs.

“Literally, the wheels fell off. The only explanation you can have for that is that somehow the mindset has changed from being someone who was just looking at each race and seeing it as separate individual challenges, which is the right way to go about it.”

Damon Hill thinks the pressure of an F1 title fight weighed on Oscar Piastri

Australia has not had an F1 champion to celebrate since Alan Jones won the 1980 title. The Melbourne native followed three-time champion Jack Brabham in becoming the champion, after the Hurstville, New South Wales native won the title in the 1959, ‘60 and ‘66 seasons.

READ MORE: The best moments of Oscar Piastri’s career in Formula 1

Piastri dethroning Norris atop the standings back in April even made him the first Australian to lead the championship since his manager, Webber, back in 2010. But his title hopes have stuttered ever since McLaren told Piastri to give P2 back to Norris in the Italian Grand Prix.

Hill now thinks Piastri leading the championship from round five until round 20 when Norris won the Mexico City Grand Prix would have weighed heavily on him. The Briton expects the weight of the championship fight has been a “problem” that Piastri is struggling to manage.

“It’s fantastic,” Hill added about being in an F1 title fight, having done so three times. “It’s exciting. But it also gets to you, there’s no doubt about it. And I wonder whether that’s the Oscar problem, if there is such a thing as a problem, is there’s this weight, literally a weight.

“You cannot get to the end, you’ve got to lead. You wish they could call it now. If they could stop the championship and say, ‘And now we have to declare a winner, because we can’t do the last five races’.

“And as we’re talking now, he’s not in the lead. He’s one point behind. But for a long time, Oscar was holding this weight.”