Piastri, who officially endorsed the Grill’d burger earlier this season, will hope to get out of the pickle in which he finds himself when the series heads to Las Vegas next week. The race there is the first of a season-ending triple-header, which also includes Qatar and Abu Dhabi and will decide the destination of the world title.
There is no denying Piastri is struggling. So strong in the first half of the year, he has now finished behind Norris at five successive grands prix. But if it is not burgers, what is it?
Has Oscar Piastri’s F1 season been cursed by a Grill’d promotion?Credit: Getty Images
The answer may, after all, lie in what happened at Monza. The team-orders row that ignited at the end of that race, when McLaren asked Piastri to give Norris his second place back after they had botched the Englishman’s pit stop, was only worth three points (it was actually a six-point swing in the title race).
But Piastri has now admitted that the row contributed to his state of mind at the following race in Baku, when he produced his ugliest performance of the season, which included a crash in qualifying, a false start and a crash on the opening lap of the race.
“Yeah, ultimately [Baku] was a combination of quite a few things,” Piastri told Tom Clarkson on the F1 Beyond the Grid podcast when asked to explain his Azerbaijan weekend. “The race before that was Monza, which I didn’t feel was a particularly great weekend from my own performance, and there was what happened with the pit stops…”
Could it really have derailed his season? Looking back, Piastri was peeved at the time. The 24-year-old eventually acquiesced but not without pointing out over team radio that it seemed a change to previous McLaren team policy that “a slow pit stop was part of racing”.
Oscar Piastri did not have a good event in Baku, Azerbaijan in September.Credit: Getty Images
Afterwards there was lots of talk about whether it was fair, and whether the team were favouring Norris. Piastri admitted there were “valid reasons” why the team made the call (Norris had done the same thing for him in Budapest in 2024 en route to his maiden win in F1). He stressed it was not worth getting worked up about. He still had a 31-point lead at that point.
It is worth stressing that Piastri in no way blamed his Baku performance entirely on Monza. He admitted he drove poorly that weekend as well as having some technical issues, including an engine problem. But he did repeat later in the podcast that it contributed to his mindset, saying there were “some things in the lead-up that were maybe not the most helpful”.
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“There were a lot of little things that added up,” he concluded. “Trying to pinpoint which one of those was the cause and which was the effect… we’ll never know. Ultimately, Baku was the perfect storm. Let’s not beat about the bush, that was the worst weekend I’ve had in racing. But probably the most useful in some ways.”
Perhaps it comes down to experience. It is easy to forget that this is only Piastri’s third season as an F1 driver, as opposed to Norris’s seventh. Perhaps he needs to learn better how to process the setbacks. Perhaps he will come back over the last three races and turn the tables again. Who knows? No doubt Grill’d will be ready with a special promotion either way.
