New Delhi, Nov 4 (IANS) Oscar Piastri’s mid-season slump in form has cost him the Formula 1 championship lead, and 1997 world champion Jacques Villeneuve believes the Australian’s recent struggles are a sign that he has already reached his peak performance level.

Speaking on Sky Sports’ The F1 Show ahead of the Sao Paulo Grand Prix, Villeneuve said Piastri’s inability to keep pace with his McLaren teammate Lando Norris in recent weeks stems from the fact that he was already performing at the limit earlier in the season. “We didn’t have an extremely fantastic Lando early in the season, not the Lando we had at the end of last year,” Villeneuve explained. “And we kept saying, ‘oh, that’s because Piastri has stepped up, he’s now on Lando’s pace and even quicker.’ But was it actually Piastri stepping up or Lando that just wasn’t on it? He kept saying he wasn’t very comfortable with the car. And maybe that made Piastri complacent a bit. When all you have to fight is your team-mate, maybe you don’t push to that last limit, that last tenth of a second.”

Piastri had appeared on course for a maiden Drivers’ Championship title when he won the Dutch Grand Prix in late August — his seventh win in 15 rounds — to move 34 points clear of Norris. But since then, the 24-year-old has failed to win in five consecutive races and hasn’t finished on the podium in the last four, allowing Norris to reclaim the championship lead with a dominant victory at the Mexico City Grand Prix.

Villeneuve believes the turning point came when Norris rediscovered his best form. “Suddenly, we get Baku and we get Max winning everything. And Lando stepped up. Lando is driving faster and better than he’s been all season,” he said. “Piastri is not stepping up. He was already at his limit. And when you do that, when you have to go that extra two tenths, and suddenly, you find problems in the car that did not exist.”

The former world champion suggested that the errors creeping into Piastri’s driving — including crashes in both qualifying and the race in Azerbaijan, and a failed overtake that took out both McLaren drivers in Austin’s Sprint — were symptoms of a driver trying too hard. “When you drive within the limit, the car is perfect. It’s easy, you drive, you save your tires. And suddenly, you have to go a couple of tenths faster. You can’t drive the car anymore. Everything is wrong. You don’t know why,” Villeneuve said.

He dismissed the idea that McLaren’s machinery was to blame for the shift in form. “The McLaren car hasn’t evolved that much, so there’s no reason for it to be driven differently. Same tyres, they don’t change. Sometimes they’re softer, sometimes they’re not. The track is warmer and so on, but there isn’t that big of a difference,” he said. “It just takes your team-mate to step up a little bit. And you’re realising, ‘oh, how do I do that?’ And suddenly, you drive tensed up, nothing works, and that’s it. It gets in your head. And you just get slower and slower and slower, and you start inventing setups that don’t exist.”

Villeneuve added that such mental spirals are common when drivers lose confidence against a faster teammate. “You start doubting your way of driving. You look at the data and you say, ‘oh, my team-mate is one tenth quicker in that corner, I need to drive differently.’ And that’s when it goes wrong. You have to remember what you were doing that was good and just step up a little bit.”

With just four rounds remaining, starting with this weekend’s Sao Paulo Grand Prix, Piastri trails Norris by a single point in what has become one of the most tightly contested title battles in recent memory.

–IANS

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