Oscar Piastri Has Reached His Limit Suggests Jacques Villeneuve

The 1997 F1 World Champion, Jacques Villeneuve, has never been one to hold back. His critiques are forthright and cutting — the kind that sting from afar without ever needing a physical slap. His words wound, and his analysis is often grounded in a harsh but realistic perspective. This time, his focus turns to Oscar Piastri, who has been struggling to maintain form through a gruelling 24-race calendar.

For much of the season, Piastri looked untouchable — outperforming Lando Norris and building a sizeable lead that seemed so comfortable he could have leaned back, put his feet up, and calmly sipped a cup of English tea.

But with just four races remaining, that once-secure lead has evaporated. Piastri now sits a single point behind Norris, while Max Verstappen lurks menacingly in the background, ready to pounce should the McLaren duo trip over one another.

Piastri has endured a string of underwhelming performances, with Mexico marking his fourth consecutive race without a podium finish. As a result, Norris has edged ahead by a single point, while Verstappen trails just 35 points further back.

Norris’s dominant victory at the Mexican Grand Prix was widely hailed as proof that the Briton has finally reached Piastri’s level of performance. However, Villeneuve sees it differently. Speaking on a podcast, the 1997 World Champion offered his thoughts on Piastri’s downturn in form:

“We didn’t have an extremely fantastic Lando early in the season. Not the Lando we had at the end of last year. And we kept saying, ‘Oh, that’s because, you know, Piastri has stepped up. He’s now on Lando’s pace, and even quicker.”

“But was it actually Piastri stepping up, or Lando that just wasn’t on it? He kept saying he wasn’t very comfortable with the car. And maybe that made Piastri complacent a bit. When all you have to fight is your team-mate, maybe you don’t push to that last limit, that last tenth of a second.”

“Suddenly, we get Baku, and we get Max that’s winning everything. And Lando stepped up. Lando is driving faster and better than he’s been all season. And Piastri is not stepping up. He was already at his limit.”

“And when you do that, when you have to go that extra two-tenths, suddenly you find problems in the cars that did not exist. You know, when you drive within the limit, the car’s perfect. It’s easy, you drive, you save your tires.”

“And suddenly, you have to go a couple of tenths faster. You can’t drive the car anymore. Everything is wrong, you don’t know why, because right now, we have the same car. It hasn’t evolved that much, so there’s no reason for it to be driven differently. Same tires, it’s Pirellis. They don’t change. Sometimes, they’re softer, sometimes, they’re not. The track is warmer, and so on. But there isn’t that big of a difference.”

“So it just takes your team-mate to step up a little bit, and you’re realising, ‘Oh, how do I do that?’ And suddenly, nothing works. It gets in your head, and you just get slower and slower and slower, and you start inventing set-ups that don’t exist. You start doubting your way of driving. You look at the data, and you say, ‘Oh, my team-mate is one tenth quicker in that corner, I need to drive differently’, and that’s when it goes wrong. You have to remember what you were doing that was good and just step up a little bit.”