In the story of Oscar Piastri’s championship campaign, Sunday at the Mexico City Grand Prix could be the decisive moment.
Piastri will launch from seventh on the grid, six places behind pole-getting teammate Lando Norris, who obliterated the Australian by 0.588 seconds in qualifying.
If both drivers finish where they start, Piastri will lose the championship lead with four grands prix remaining, ending his 15-round run at the top of the table.
Fox Sports, available on Kayo Sports, is the only place to watch every practice, qualifying session and race in the 2025 FIA Formula One World Championship™ LIVE in 4K. New to Kayo? Join now and get your first month for just $1.
The stakes don’t get much bigger than that.
WHERE’S IT GONE WRONG FOR PIASTRI?
Piastri and his shrinking championship lead need a strong weekend in Mexico to steady the listing ship.
So far, however, he’s only taken on more water.
At no point in Mexico City has he looked truly at one with the car, at least not in the same way as Norris has.
Qualifying laid bare that gap: 0.588 seconds, a yawning chasm in Formula 1 terms.
It was the day’s biggest gap between any two teammates in the same session.
And just to hammer home how out of the ordinary a result this is for the usually dependable Piastri, his almost 0.6-second deficit is the largest gap between him and Norris of the entire season.
Eighth is also Piastri’s worst qualifying result of the year when he’s seen the end of the session — only his crashed-out ninth in Azerbaijan was worse — though he’ll get one place back on the grid after Carlos Sainz serves a five-place grid penalty.
“It’s definitely unusual,” McLaren boss Andrea Stella said. “Our two drivers have always been separated by a few milliseconds in qualifying, by a few centimetres in the race, so it’s unusual to see this distance on the grid and this distance in terms of lap time.”
Stella forecast Mexico as another potentially tricky race for Piastri after Austin. Despite on paper the tracks being very different, and despite Piastri saying he didn’t expect any carry-over struggles to this round, one key trait of both circuits appears to be making the difference.
“I think in Austin and here the conditions are such that the car slides a lot, and I think this requires a particular familiarity with the car, with how you exploit the car, which is possibly something on which Oscar needs to still work a little bit,” he said.
“A technical detail is that if you think in the race when the tyres are old and the car slides a lot, it’s Lando’s regime. Here the qualifying sessions are almost kind of similar to that regime. Oscar is more a driver of having grip and pushing the car in a certain way.”
All weekend Piastri has struggled particularly in the middle sector, which comprises most of the corners.
The telemetry shows that the high-speed esses from turn 7 to turn 11 punished him most severely, his deficit blowing out by around 0.3 seconds through just those corners.
Understandably flat after qualifying, Piastri admitted that the feeling here was in fact akin to last weekend in Austin and that he simply ran out of answers to try to close the gap.
“Some of the things that were difficult in Austin are also proving difficult here,” he said, per Autosport, though he seemed surprised that he hadn’t been able to cure them in the week between events.
“I think from Austin there were some things that were clear, but even those things that were clear were a bit unusual, some of the differences.
“This weekend it’s been a bit different. I’ve not changed really how I’m driving since the start of the season and even a few races ago when things were going really well, so it’s difficult to pinpoint where the lap time’s been lacking this weekend.”
In these conditions Piastri appears to have hit a ceiling, a scenario for which Stella also had a clear explanation.
“We shouldn’t forget that Oscar is year three in Formula 1,” he said.
He added: “He’s also one that learns at the speed of light, so if we do good work of processing what the learning is, he will do it.”
MASSIVE pileup halts Gold Coast race | 00:30
NORRIS HAS A SHOT AT REDEMPTION IN McLAREN BOUNCE-BACK
Norris had no such trouble in qualifying, taking a commanding pole position that puts him in the box seat to retake the title lead after a long slog behind his teammate for the bulk of the campaign.
If he wins the race with Piastri no high than fifth, he will resume top spot for the first time since the Bahrain Grand Prix, round 4 of the season.
Just four grands prix will remain after this weekend.
This is the high point of Norris’s recovery from what looked like the border of championship wilderness only a few months ago.
His last pole was the Belgian Grand Prix in July, and his last victory was at the following race in Hungary, though he was lucky to pinch it after being given an unexpectedly favourable strategy that got him ahead of Piastri, who had been decisively quicker on the day.
His power unit failure at the next race in the Netherlands put him 34 points off the lead, with momentum looking entirely against him.
But he’s hauled himself out of that hole admirably. On most weekends since then he’s been the better McLaren driver, and now he has a chance to make himself the championship favourite.
“I do feel like I’m doing a very good job,” Norris said. “I feel like I have been for a good amount of weekends now, especially when I get this feeling that I had today.
“Q1, Q2, Q3 — all of my laps were good. No mistakes, no lockups — none of these things.
“The car is incredibly quick, but it’s not easy to drive … but when you just get in that little bit of a rhythm, it’s flying, and that’s where I was today.”
More than just for Norris, however, is that this is good news for McLaren too.
This is the team’s first pole since the Dutch Grand Prix five races ago, and while tomorrow’s result is pending, this is by far the most convincing the team has looked throughout that time.
“Important that we as a team confirmed that we can have the best car after a few races in which we hesitated and possibly didn’t maximise the performance,” Stella said. “Important for Lando, important for McLaren.”
‘Should have put up the white flag then! | 02:57
WHAT HAPPENED TO MAX VERSTAPPEN?
It wasn’t just McLaren’s dominant pole that was reminiscent of earlier parts of the season.
For the first time in a long time Red Bull Racing was well off the pace.
Verstappen will launch from fifth. Ahead of him are one McLaren and Mercedes apiece and both Ferrari drivers. It’s the first time since the Hungarian Grand Prix that the team hasn’t had the first or second quickest car in qualifying.
It’s not just that the car didn’t have the pace to go with the other frontrunners. It’s that the team couldn’t solve the problem of its lack of speed overnight on Friday.
Unlike the last four rounds, in which the car has been responsive to the team’s inputs and given Verstappen the feeling he needs to get the most out of it, this weekend it’s been stubbornly unresponsive to change.
“We tried a lot of stuff, even going into qualifying, and I guess we got it a little bit wrong in some areas of the track,” he said.
“[We made] big enough [changes] to normally see a difference, which we have seen in the last few weekends — [that] if you make a change, it shows something. But this whole weekend has been tough.
“We couldn’t find the grip in the car, so that’s something that we need to understand, because in qualifying when you have those kinds of issues, you are sliding a lot, and on a track like this, you cannot afford that.”
Unsurprisingly the cost of sliding — the cost of overheating the tyres — compounded through the lap. Verstappen was only around 0.1 seconds down through the first sector but ended up 0.484 seconds off the pace as the tyres gradually gave up.
It left him downcast about his race prospects.
“There is no real recovery drive when you have no pace,” he told Sky Sports. “I need people to retire in front of me to go ahead.
“Every lap that I did this weekend has not been good. Short run, long run — it never felt in the window, and that is not going to suddenly change tomorrow for the better.”
If he and the McLaren drivers finish where they’re set to start, he’ll still take a nibble out of his title deficit, even if Norris were to inherit the lead.
But after a month of seemingly boundless momentum, the Dutchman’s fairytale run to reinsert himself into the championship has hit a major hurdle that could undo it all.
‘Biggest crash there for a long time!’ | 01:50
FERRARI COULD TAKE ITS FIRST WIN OF THE YEAR
If there’s any silver lining to the result for Verstappen and for Piastri, it’s that Ferrari will start with both cars inside the top three on merit, putting the team in a position to take its first win of the year.
Charles Leclerc was the only driver to briefly challenge Norris’s supremacy when he took provisional pole after the first runs of Q3, but he was soundly beaten on the second runs to end up 0.262 seconds adrift.
Lewis Hamilton was just 0.09 seconds slower in third.
It’s the first time both Ferrari drivers have qualified inside the top three in a performance that team boss Frédéric Vasseur rates as even better than Leclerc’s shock pole in Hungary.
“I think this one is a bit better because we were there [on the pace] from the beginning,” he said.
“From Q1, Q2, Q3 it went well. We saved also one set [of softs] for tomorrow for Charles, and this is important, but overall I think it was a proper quali and so far has been a very good weekend.”
There are two elements to the result.
The first is what Vasseur has been insisting for much of the season: that the Ferrari car can be a decent performer with better execution.
“The big difference is that if you start on a good foot, it’s much easier to finetune everything than if you have a poor Friday,” he said. “Austin was quite difficult to recover and to finetune the car and the driving; I think this weekend in Mexico we are overall doing a better job.”
But the other is that Ferrari has always had an affinity for this place. It is, after all, the reigning winner, with Carlos Sainz having scored his and the team’s last victory to date at this circuit last year.
Part of the reason for that is that Ferrari has always been strong on traction, on punching out of the sort of slow corners that dominate this track.
More important this year, though, is that the smooth Mexico City surface has allowed the car to be run lower and closer to its sweet spot that at most other circuits. In these conditions we’re able to see the best of Ferrari.
Having two cars in the fight is a luxury the team has rarely had this year, and it’s one that could pay dividends, particularly given the very long run down to the first braking zone.
The 747 metres from pole to turn 1 means Norris is guaranteed to be slipstream there. Leclerc will be on the attack, but Hamilton could get double the advantage if he slipstreams both into the first turn.
The jockeying for position makes this one of the most unpredictable and chaotic starts of the year. Whoever masters it could find themselves in a position to win the race.