News Summary
- Oscar Piastri is mathematically out of the 2026 championship, trailing Kimi Antonelli by 192 points with 183 available.
- The Australian has two Grand Prix podiums and no victories this season, while McLaren teammate Lando Norris has won twice.
- McLaren’s weaker car, missed races and the need to adapt Piastri’s driving style have all contributed to his disappointing campaign.
Oscar Piastri arrived in 2026 with good reason to believe his first world championship could be within reach. He had won seven races in 2025, challenged Lando Norris throughout the season and finished just 13 points behind the eventual champion. After the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia, that ambition has already become mathematically impossible.
The Australian left Sepang seventh in the Formula 1 standings with 128 points, 192 behind championship leader Kimi Antonelli. Seven Grands Prix and the Singapore Sprint remain, offering a maximum of 183 points. Even a perfect finish to the season would leave Piastri short of Antonelli’s current total.
That is a substantial reversal for a driver who was fighting for the championship at the final race last year. But understanding it requires looking at both McLaren’s loss of competitiveness and Piastri’s results within the team. The car has made winning harder; the comparison with Norris shows why that explanation cannot carry the entire argument.
McLaren lost its advantage when the regulations changed
The first obstacle was the change in machinery. McLaren’s championship-winning position in 2025 did not survive the introduction of the new regulations.
Mercedes established the early benchmark, leaving McLaren chasing performance rather than defending an advantage. Piastri’s second place in Japan and third in Miami suggested he could still collect strong results, but those remain his only Grand Prix podiums of the season.
Since Miami, he has gone 12 consecutive Grands Prix without finishing in the top three. That sequence includes races in which the car was competitive enough for Norris to win.
Sepang reinforced the current limitation. Piastri finished sixth in the chaotic Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia, while Red Bull won with Max Verstappen and Ferrari recovered to third and fourth.
“However, we just didn’t have the pace we needed today to make a lasting impact,” Piastri said in McLaren’s post-race assessment.
Andrea Stella’s assessment placed McLaren fourth in the competitive order. That matters because it distinguishes a poorly executed race from a car that cannot realistically deliver a podium even when its driver performs well.
Piastri’s championship elimination therefore reflects a wider failure to reproduce last season’s competitiveness. But the season also contains evidence that his personal campaign has fallen below what the McLaren could occasionally achieve.
Norris provides the uncomfortable comparison
After Sepang, Norris has 188 points to Piastri’s 128. The 60-point gap between teammates is considerably larger than the 13 points that separated them at the end of 2025.
The comparison is not perfectly balanced. Piastri failed to start the opening two Grands Prix, immediately losing opportunities to establish momentum. He then retired in Hungary, where contact with Carlos Sainz and a subsequent gearbox problem ended a race he had led.
Those setbacks cannot be treated as evidence that he simply lacked speed. Hungary, particularly, showed that a potential victory disappeared before the chequered flag.
Nevertheless, Norris converted McLaren’s strongest period into wins in Hungary and the Netherlands. Piastri left those weekends with no Grand Prix points in Budapest and sixth place at Zandvoort.
The contrast is clear:
| Measure | Piastri | Norris |
|---|---|---|
| Points after Sepang | 128 | 188 |
| Championship position | 7th | 5th |
| Grand Prix wins in 2026 | 0 | 2 |
| Difference between teammates | −60 | +60 |
Figures after the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia on 4 October.
The table does not assign responsibility for every lost point. It establishes the question Piastri must answer: why has he extracted less from the same team’s campaign, including during its most competitive weekends?
McLaren identified a driving-style problem
There is a more concrete explanation than speculation about confidence or motivation. After Monza, Stella revealed that McLaren had been working with Piastri on adapting his driving to the demands of the new car.
“We needed to make some adaptations to his natural driving style,” Stella explained.
The team principal connected that work to the car’s behaviour when sliding during races. McLaren had used a similar process with Norris the previous year and believed the changes were beginning to help Piastri.
That is a significant detail. A driver who excelled with one generation of car can need time to find the same effectiveness with another. Piastri’s ability did not disappear when the regulations changed, but the techniques that had supported his strongest performances no longer necessarily produced the same return.
Monza offered encouragement: he qualified third before an impeding penalty and remained competitive in the race. Yet that improvement has not developed into a consistent run of podium challenges.
Piastri needs to turn the adaptation into repeatable results, particularly when McLaren provides a car capable of beating its usual position.
The lost 2025 title is context, not a diagnosis
It would be easy to connect this season’s difficulties to the championship that slipped away last year. Piastri had a commanding position before his late-season downturn allowed Norris to move ahead, with Verstappen also finishing above him.
However, that sequence does not establish that disappointment caused his 2026 performances. Mechanical problems, missed starts, a less competitive car and the adaptation identified by Stella provide tangible explanations. A claim about psychological damage would require evidence beyond the standings.
“I’ve got nothing to prove. I’m certainly not going to have a rebellious streak or anything like that,” Piastri said in Melbourne before the season began.
That statement reflected his intention to continue working with McLaren after a difficult championship defeat. It should not be used as proof that everything was resolved, but neither should this year’s results be turned into an unsupported story about a driver who stopped believing in himself.
The more useful criticism concerns execution: qualifying cleanly, avoiding penalties, completing races and converting the strongest weekends into results comparable with those of his teammate.
Piastri’s remaining races now carry a different test
The championship calculation is settled. Piastri cannot win the 2026 title, but the remaining races can still influence how convincingly he enters the next campaign.
A victory would help, although it depends on McLaren recovering enough performance to challenge the front. More immediately, Piastri needs a sustained sequence in which his results match the potential of the car and his comparison with Norris becomes closer.
He has already demonstrated that he can win repeatedly and sustain a championship challenge. The task now is to recover that consistency with a car that demands something different from him.
McLaren must provide the performance. Piastri must show that, when it arrives, he is ready to use it. After seven victories in 2025 and none so far in 2026, both sides have work to do before they can credibly return to a championship fight.
Formula 1 returns this weekend, from 9–11 October, for the Singapore Grand Prix at Marina Bay. GRANDE PRÊMIO will cover all the action.
F1 today: FAQ
What time is the 2026 Singapore GP?
The Singapore GP starts at 20:00 local time on Sunday, October 11. That is 13:00 in the UK, 08:00 ET in the US and Canada and 17:30 in India. Singapore is a sprint weekend, with sprint qualifying on Friday and the sprint on Saturday.
Why does George Russell have a grid penalty in Singapore?
Russell has exhausted his permitted allocation of four engines after suffering a power-unit failure at Sepang. Mercedes must introduce another unit, triggering a grid penalty for Sunday’s Grand Prix. The penalty does not apply to Saturday’s sprint.
Can Kimi Antonelli win the F1 championship in Singapore?
No. Antonelli leads Russell by 84 points, 320 to 236, but cannot mathematically secure the 2026 title in Singapore. His first opportunity to become world champion comes at the United States GP in Austin.
