Jacques Villeneuve Deals Damning Oscar Piastri Verdict As F1 Advantage Disappears

Jacques Villeneuve has suggested Lando Norris' apparent struggles early in the current Formula 1 season led to McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri becoming "complacent."

The Australian seemed destined to earn a first F1 drivers' title after moving 34 points clear of Norris after winning a Dutch Grand Prix that saw his teammate retire late in the race.

But since then, Norris has turned the tables on Piastri to take a one-point lead into the final four rounds, helped largely by the former championship leader's own struggles behind the wheel.

Complacency crept in?

Despite a podium in Monza, Piastri finished behind Norris before crashing out of qualifying and the race in Azerbaijan. A failure to match Norris in the time since has allowed the Briton to take the ascendancy into the final rounds, starting at this weekend's Sao Paulo Grand Prix at Interlagos.

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Questioning whether Piastri would be able to fight back, 1997 world champion Villeneuve told Sky Sports UK: "We didn't have an extremely fantastic Lando early in the season, not the Lando we had at the end of last year 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.

"Suddenly, we get Baku and we get Max [Verstappen] winning everything. And Lando stepped up. Lando is driving faster and better than he's been all season. 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 cars that did not exist."

Piastri 'tensing up'

Piastri had won seven of the opening 14 races of the campaign but is now winless in five, suggesting that he has had to alter his way of driving the car.

Addressing this, Villeneuve explained: "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.

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"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.

"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.

"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."

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