Guenther Steiner blames Oscar Piastri's 'loss of confidence' in McLaren for sudden performance loss to Max Verstappen

Former Haas F1 team principal Guenther Steiner has attributed Oscar Piastri's unexpected drop in performance to the lack of support for him from McLaren. The Australian driver has been leading the drivers' championship since Round 5 of the 2025 F1 season.

Moreover, until five races ago, Piastri led the drivers' championship by 34 points over teammate Lando Norris and by 104 points over third-placed Max Verstappen. However, the Red Bull driver has closed the gap to 40 points within four race weekends, while Norris is only 14 points behind Oscar Piastri now.

The championship leader has had three subpar race weekends in a row. He DNFed at the Azerbaijan GP after crashing out on the opening lap. On the following race weekend in Singapore, he had a lap 1 incident with Norris, which not only cost him track position, but also brought McLaren's 'Papaya Rules' under the scanner when the team took no action for the incident.

Piastri's most recent failure came at the US GP, where he DNFed in the Sprint Race. When it came to the main race, he displayed nothing extraordinary and finished in the same fifth place where he started - P5, his second-worst non-DNF result of the season. All this is happening while McLaren is facing severe backlash for its vague intra-team rules, which many fans feel favor Lando Norris.

Guenther Steiner feels Oscar Piastri's recent drop in form can be directly attributed to his losing faith in the team.

"I think a few bad races and he can see, I don't know if he feels that the team... because I think the team should now support him now that there is pressure coming from someone else outside the team," Steiner said on the Red Flags podcast. "When you're a team member, you want the support to win the championship. He doesn't get it and is starting to doubt if the team is behind him or is it anything different. And that obviously knocks on your confidence."

The former Haas boss added:

"When you go into a race, you need to be completely free to do things you want to do, and when you are not free, you make mistakes. It's nothing else in normal life. Wwhen you're not sure if you can do this, you cannot do it normally. So I think that is what is this drop in performance because of a drop in confidence."

McLaren boss gives clear say on driver prioritization between Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris

Lando Norris with Oscar Piastri at the F1 Singapore Grand Prix - Source: Getty

Max Verstappen put on a dominant show during the United States Grand Prix weekend, which saw him reduce the gap to championship leader Oscar Piastri by 23 points over the race weekend. This brought up the question - should McLaren prioritize one driver for the remainder of the season to ensure they don't lose the drivers' championship to the four-time F1 champion?

Team principal of the Woking outfit, Andrea Stella, had a clear response to that question post-race.

"When it comes to having to make a call as to a driver, this will only be read by mathematics," he said via PlanetF1. "You know, we talked before about the experience, and leaning on the experience, I can recall at least [in] 2007, 2010, in which you go to the last race, and it’s actually the third [placed driver, ed.] that wins the championship. So we’re not going to close the door, unless this is closed by mathematics.”

Guenther Steiner has expressed his opinion on more than one occasion about how McLaren needs to prioritize Oscar Piastri. Max Verstappen is no longer a distant threat. The Red Bull driver has reduced the points gap to Piastri by 64 points in four race weekends. He has five more race weekends, including two Sprint weekends, to scale the 40-point gap.