The sun has set on the 2025 Formula 1 season, and the darkness has swallowed Oscar Piastri’s championship campaign. As day turned to night in Abu Dhabi, only teammate Lando Norris, his season-long title rival, was left shining brightly. For the Englishman, it was a lifelong dream fulfilled. For the Australian, it was a bitter defeat that will return him to square one in Melbourne in March.
Piastri’s journey from leading the championship standings for more races than any other driver this season to ultimately falling short is a tale of a mighty rise but an uncontrollable fall. The 2025 season was a rollercoaster for the young Australian, filled with moments of triumph and heartbreak.
The Rise of Oscar Piastri
Despite a sterling season, Piastri’s year couldn’t have started any worse. While challenging Norris for victory at the first race in Australia, he found himself temporarily beached on the grass as a second band of rain hit Albert Park, dropping him from second at worst to ninth in front of his home crowd. But his 23-point handicap was no impediment to a mighty surge back to the top.
He dominated the Chinese Grand Prix, one of his weakest in recent seasons, and won for fun at the Middle Eastern rounds in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. He avenged his lost 2024 Miami Grand Prix victory by outperforming Norris at the scene of the Briton’s maiden win, and suddenly his 23-point deficit was a 16-point lead.
Four wins from the first six became seven from the first nine with a controlled victory in Spain — another historically poor circuit for the Australian — to establish his lead as sustainable through the European leg of the season. He was a devastating combination of speed and composure, of aggression and discretion.
“I think for everyone there’s always moments, and no season is ever going to be perfect,” Piastri said. “Definitely on my side of things, there have been a few races or a few moments I’d like to have again.”
The Wobble and Fall
Piastri’s advantage over Norris was only nine points at the mid-season break, but the margin underrated his superiority. The complexion of the season began to change almost immediately after the break. Having enjoyed some career-best form before the break, Piastri endured the worst weekend of his racing life just two rounds afterwards, at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
He arrived in Baku as the reigning winner and on a remarkable streak of 44 consecutive finishes and 42 consecutive scoring weekends. He ended it embedded in the barriers on the first lap. It was the culmination of a bizarrely error-prone 24 hours, the Australian having crashed out of qualifying on Saturday and then jumped the start of the grand prix before crashing out.
With six rounds to go, and with Norris having closed his deficit to 22 points — and Verstappen looming at 63 points adrift — the four-race swing through Austin, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and Las Vegas would always be influential to the championship outcome. They formed the worst run of results of Piastri’s season.
He was consistently 0.3 seconds slower than Norris over a single lap at the Circuit of the Americas, far beyond the season-average gap between the two. For the sprint that translated to only one place in qualifying, but for the grand prix, Piastri was banished to sixth on the grid.
“I think I’ve just had to drive very differently the last couple of weekends, or I’ve not driven differently when I should have,” Piastri said afterwards. “I think that’s been a little bit kind of strange to get my head around, because I’ve been driving exactly the same as I have all year.”
The Circumstances and Missed Chances
The Las Vegas qualifying yellow suddenly felt very on brand for Piastri’s season, which by then had an air of having gone off the rails. The circumstantial points haul felt enormous. There was the spin in Australia — identical to Norris but without an identical outcome — that cost him 23 points straight off the bat.
There was the dud strategy at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix that left him third behind his teammate. The same would happen at the Hungarian Grand Prix but to far more significant effect. Norris, after a terrible start, was given what turned out to be the faster strategy and beat the otherwise faster Piastri to victory.
“It’s just very, very fine margins and tough moments and things that could easily go either way that are creating big consequences at the moment,” Piastri lamented.
Despite a slow start in Abu Dhabi, he ended the weekend as the quicker McLaren driver. He also had the race pace to challenge Verstappen had he been given a strategy to win the race rather than one that would have allowed him to capitalize on incidents in his favor. Not for the first time this season, Piastri was left to wonder how different things could have been had circumstances fallen in his favor.
The Hope and Future Prospects
For all the disappointment that comes with title defeat, the quality of Piastri’s season shouldn’t be underestimated. His third-place title finish and his 13-point deficit make him the closest any Australian has got to the title since Alan Jones in 1980, eclipsing Mark Webber’s 14-point deficit from third place in 2010.
Despite his decorated junior CV, his career got away from a standing start, having been sidelined by Alpine in 2022 before jumping at the chance to debut for McLaren the following year. In modern Formula 1, drivers do not contend for championships so early, but Piastri led the series for six months and 15 races, far more than any other driver this year.
“I think when things have been good this year it felt unstoppable at points,” he told Sky Sports. “To even be able to get to that point is a pretty cool feeling to have. There’s been plenty of times when that’s not been the case.”
Continuing on the trajectory set in his first three seasons will see him return to Formula 1 in 2026 even faster, even sharper, and even stronger than he was this year. His potential is still unfulfilled. “He learnt so rapidly,” McLaren boss Andrea Stella told Sky Sports. “His trajectory is phenomenal, and definitely we have a future multiple world champion in Oscar.”
Rivals be warned. This is only the beginning for Oscar Piastri.
