Max Verstappen has described Oscar Piastri’s late-season collapse as ‘very bizarre’ and questioned why McLaren opted not to fight the Australian’s 10-second time penalty at the Brazilian Grand Prix last time out.
Piastri made himself the firm favourite to win the 2025 Drivers’ Championship title after capitalising on Lando Norris’ DNF in Zandvoort to take a 34-point lead. However, since then, he has been beaten by both his team-mate and Verstappen in six consecutive race weekends.
In Brazil last time out, Piastri was beaten by his McLaren rival in all four competitive sessions. After crashing with Kimi Antonelli at Turn One on a safety car restart, he was given a 10-second time penalty. This dropped him back into the pack, and he could only recover to fifth on the road before the chequered flag waved.
Now, with just three races remaining, Norris leads the World Championship by 24 points, and Piastri is fighting to stay in contention. Asked about the Aussie’s slump, Verstappen was at a loss to explain it.
“I have no explanation for that, to be honest,” he said in Las Vegas. “I find it very bizarre. I didn’t expect it to go like this, although at the end of the day it’s not really my problem.” Probed that surely Piastri had not lost his ability to extract speed from the car, Verstappen added: “No, I don’t think so. But honestly, I also don’t know how this is possible.”
Verstappen was also asked about Piastri’s penalty in Brazil. Charles Leclerc, who was taken out of the race as a result of the Aussie’s contact with Antonelli, even backed the McLaren driver, while Carlos Sainz delivered a passionate defence of his move on Thursday in Las Vegas.
“Yeah, I don’t know why they handled it like that,” Verstappen confessed. “In the end, you can be angry about it, but the penalty will still stand anyway. You just have to live with it. If you have a problem with that, then you need to contact the stewards or the FIA, and maybe you can talk about it for the future.”
Before the race in Brazil, Verstappen’s father, Jos, suggested to Piastri that he needed to put his foot down to avoid becoming an afterthought in the Drivers’ Championship title fight and suffering irreversible reputation damage.
“No, but I think that has to do with how they operate as a team as well,” Verstappen said when asked about his father’s comments. “That’s not how I operate. But that’s fine, everyone does their own thing. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I am a bit different in that regard.
“I don’t know what has happened or what hasn’t happened, so it’s difficult for me to judge. But I would probably have been a bit more annoyed, I think, when you’re that far ahead and suddenly that far behind.”
