Oscar Piastri’s pre-race preparations for the Mexican GP might have just saved his championship hopes

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McLaren driver Oscar Piastri fell behind teammate Lando Norris in the championship for the first time since April at the Mexico City Grand Prix.

Oscar Piastri could only start from seventh at the Mexico City Grand Prix and could only watch as Lando Norris stormed off into the distance to take the most dominant victory of his Formula 1 career.

The Australian’s recent results have seen him give up his lead in the drivers’ championship, and he now trails Norris by a single point with four races to go.

Since winning the Dutch Grand Prix, Piastri has failed to finish ahead of Norris or Max Verstappen at any of the next five races.

Team principal Andrea Stella has told Piastri to be proud of his comeback in Mexico, but has also admitted that the 24-year-old is beginning to have struggles that Norris isn’t experiencing.

Piastri is having more difficulty at low-grip circuits, and the way in which Norris is setting his car up to counteract this doesn’t appear to be helping his teammate in the same way.

Journalists Rebecca Clancy and Ben Hunt believe Piastri did something just before Sunday’s race in Mexico that might have kept his championship chances alive.

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Oscar Piastri ‘spent all of Saturday night’ studying McLaren data to keep F1 championship hopes alive

Speaking on the Inside the Piranha Club Podcast, Clancy said: “He has finished last of the three contenders in this championship fight for the last five races.

“He qualified nearly six-tenths off Norris from pole on Saturday, seven places behind Norris.

“He apparently spent all of Saturday night with his engineers digging into the data to see and try what he could come up with.

“He said after the race yesterday that he cannot understand why, for 19 races, he’s been able to drive that car, but he just cannot work out what’s going wrong now.

“He doesn’t seem in a good place, does he?”

Hunt replied: “He doesn’t seem in a good place, does he? You try to second-guess things, don’t you? I think that’s what it is.

“And then you start looking, and the deeper that you go, you want to go back to, hang on a minute, that was a really good race for me. Let’s use this setup for this race.

“Deep in his heart, he knows that’s still probably not the right setup, but he had confidence in that setup. It’s a case now where you have to trust the data and what the engineers are telling you, rather than what you think is going to happen and how you feel the situation is going to be.

“It’s shades of Jenson Button in 2009 when he started so well and then all of a sudden the progress stopped with that car and other people caught up and then it was just sort of limping over the line.”

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Do Jenson Button comparisons apply to Oscar Piastri in his quest to win the 2025 championship?

As Hunt mentions, Jenson Button also struggled to get his only championship win over the line in 2009.

Button has already told Piastri not to copy him in one aspect of his title chase, but the Brit did get over the line after a phenomenal start to the season.

Button won six of the first seven races of the 2009 campaign, but only recorded two more podiums for the rest of the season.

With four races to go, Button had a 14-point lead over Rubens Barrichello, a far more comfortable buffer than Piastri possesses right now, especially as a win was only worth 10 points that year.

Button received a hostile reception at the final race in Brazil that year because he’d beaten their hometown hero Barrichello to the title.

Considering Norris was the driver booed in Mexico, Piastri will hope he has the support of the Brazilian crowd at the next race as he looks to get his championship bid back on track.