Oscar Piastri has broken his silence on the moment that saw him go from the favourite to win the Formula One World Championship to chasing his team-mate Lando Norris, claiming his performance at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix was the ‘worst weekend’ he’s ever had in racing.
The Australian had dominated at the beginning of the 2025 season, winning seven races to take a 34-point lead heading into the Italian Grand Prix on September 7.
But his hopes of maintaining that lead ahead of his team-mate Lando Norris and Max Verstappen at the top of the Drivers’ Standings quickly began to unravel, with the 24-year-old being asked to hand second place back to the Englishman in the later stages of the race at Monza.
It meant his lead at the top of the standings was cut to 31 points.
‘Ultimately [it’s] a combination of quite a few things,’ Piastri said to Formula One’s Beyond The Grid podcast.
‘Obviously, the race before that was Monza, which I didn’t feel was a particularly great weekend from my own performance and there was obviously what happened with the pitstops.’
Oscar Piastri (pictured) has broken his silence on the moment that saw him go from the favourite to win the Formula One World Championship to chasing his team-mate Lando Norris
Norris has usurped Piastri at the top of the World Championship, taking a 36-point lead over his team-mate
Two weeks later, he arrived in Baku, hopeful he could bounce back and put some more distance between himself and Norris.
But things would go horribly wrong for the Aussie, who agonisingly crashed out of qualifying on Saturday, leaving him ninth on the grid the following day.
Perhaps too eager to get past his team-mate, Norris, who started in seventh, Piastri began the race poorly before crashing out of the race in the opening lap.
Norris would eat into Piastri’s lead at the top of the leaderboard after he finished in seventh.
While Piastri has since failed to get back onto the podium, struggling to match his team-mate, Norris, and Verstappen for pace, the memory of that torrid weekend in Azerbaijan has lived long in his memory.
‘But then also in Baku itself, Friday was tough, things weren’t working, I was overdriving, I wasn’t very happy with how I was driving and ultimately probably trying to make up for that a little bit on Saturday,’ Piastri said.
‘I think there was kind of some things in the lead-up, let’s say, that were maybe not the most helpful and then things that happened on the weekend.
‘We had an engine problem in FP1 that kind of unsettled things a bit, and then I was driving not that well. We were on C6 tyres [Pirelli’s new, softest compound] that weekend, which are notoriously tricky to handle. There were just a lot of little things that eventually kind of added up.
Piastri claims his crash-filled weekend at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix was one of the ‘worst weekends’ of racing in his career
Piastri (left) stated that he felt like he was ‘overdriving’ in Baku, adding that he ‘didn’t have a particularly great weekend in Monza’ either
‘There’s no beating around the bush, that was the worst weekend I’ve ever had in racing, but probably the most useful in some ways. So, when you can start to look at things like that, normally that helps you out quite a lot.
‘[If] you look at some of the names that have had some pretty shocking weekends, or almost unbelievable weekends or races or moments in their career where things have gone wrong; it happens to anyone.
‘There’s not one person in racing that doesn’t have some kind of disastrous story of how a weekend went wrong for them.
‘Looking at it from that perspective does help a lot, but you still need to learn the things you need to learn from weekends like that.’
Norris has swung momentum in his favour in recent weeks, with the Brit now leading Piastri by 36 points at the top of the leaderboard.
While he and Piastri have been jostling for positions all year, having also crashed at the Canadian Grand Prix and during the Sprint race in America, Piastri has shrugged off any suggestions that tensions were building between the pair.
‘It’s either exactly the same, or, honestly, probably better than it has been,’ he said.
‘It’s better, if anything, because we just know each other more now,’ he told the podcast.
While he and Piastri have been jostling for positions all year, Piastri (right) has shrugged off any suggestions that tensions were building between the pair
‘It’s our third year as teammates, so we just slowly get to know each other more and more. It’s probably in a better place than it ever has been.
I think we’re both the kind of people that what happens on track stays on track. Maybe there’s short-lived emotions off the track, but I think we’re both quite good at leaving things on the track.
‘I enjoy the intensity of it, I’m not sure my body enjoys the jet lag and travel of it so much. It’s a very tough end to the season.
‘You kind of just get used to everything being an hour or two hours away. And then you kind of get to the back end of the season
