McLaren engineers all reached the same conclusion about why Oscar Piastri’s title run collapsed

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Oscar Piastri will be hoping to avoid a repeat of how the 2025 Formula 1 season ended next year after watching McLaren teammate Lando Norris steal the title.

For more than half of the 2025 campaign, Oscar Piastri was in the driver’s seat in the standings.

However, after winning the Dutch Grand Prix, Piastri didn’t stand on the top step of the podium again aside from the Sprint Race in Qatar.

Will Piastri have a better career than any driver on this list?

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McLaren messed up their strategy that weekend during the main Grand Prix, ending any hopes Piastri had of winning the championship, with Max Verstappen leapfrogging him in the process.

Damon Hill has told Piastri the demands he needs to make of McLaren going into 2026.

He’s improved at a rapid rate over his three years on the grid, but journalist Stuart Codling has outlined where McLaren’s engineers believe it went wrong for the 24-year-old during the final part of the campaign.

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

McLaren engineers think Oscar Piastri’s ‘driving style’ cost him in 2025 F1 title battle

Codling was asked on the Autosport Podcast after announcing that Piastri was seventh on their list of the top 50 drivers in 2025, about why he looked more fragile at the end of the season compared to Norris.

He said: “It set in sort of after Monza.

“And so this is why the conspiracy theorists like to believe it [that McLaren favoured Norris], because obviously in Monza, you had the team orders where McLaren asked the drivers to swap positions because they’d accidentally caused Piastri to undercut Norris.

“And so they felt they had to intervene to restore the order. Then, immediately after that, you had Piastri tonking it into the barriers, not once, but twice in Baku.

“That’s what caused the conspiracy theorists to gain momentum. But if you speak to the engineers, it’s more a case of Piastri’s driving style.

Finish the sentence: In his Formula 1 career, Oscar PIastri will win ____ titles

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“And while he’s supremely Prost-like in so many things, he’s unflappable, he’s really quick. What he does is he builds through a weekend, so he gets the car in as perfect a state as possible. And he doesn’t like the car to slide.

“And what happens on a low grip circuit is the car slides. And you have to make it slide a bit because the current generation of Formula 1 cars is heavy, and they understeer.

“And to help them turn the corner, especially the slower ones on a low grip circuit, whether that’s because of the asphalt or because it’s wet, you have to make the rear end slide a bit to get it turning.

“That just doesn’t compute in Piastri’s head. He finds it really difficult to get those little micro slides that just make the car turn into the trajectory you want before it becomes full-on oversteer.

“And that is the element of his craft that he really needs to work on. And this is what all the engineers say.”

READ MORE: All you need to know about McLaren F1 Team from team principal to engine

Can Oscar Piastri solve his driving style problem before the 2026 Formula 1 campaign?

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that any issues Piastri is facing at the start of his F1 career can be resolved very quickly.

The 24-year-old had a significant deficit to Norris in qualifying in 2024, but the work he did over the winter break was immediately evident, taking six pole positions across the season.

The end of the ground-effect era will mean that all the drivers need to adjust their driving styles to adapt to the new cars.

Piastri has Mark Webber to lean on for advice, which will be crucial as he faces his most difficult challenge next year to try and come back from the disappointment of 2025.

Even when he was in championship contention, Piastri was spending late nights in the garage studying his and Norris’ data to learn where he could improve.

Lewis Hamilton has shown over the past few years that even the greatest drivers can struggle if a car doesn’t suit their driving style.

That might concern Piastri, but he should be far more adaptable at this stage of his career than the seven-time world champion.