In the high-octane world of Formula 1, empires rise and fall with the speed of a qualifying lap. But the catastrophic collapse of Oscar Piastri’s championship lead has sent a shockwave through the paddock that defies easy explanation. Just weeks ago, Piastri was the sport’s golden boy, holding a commanding 34-point lead over his McLaren teammate Lando Norris. Today, he trails him by one.

This is not just a slump; it is a freefall. After his triumphant victory at the Dutch Grand Prix, Piastri had led the championship for 15 consecutive rounds. He had built an astonishing 104-point gap over Red Bull’s Max Verstappen. The narrative was set in stone: Piastri had finally evolved, stepping out of Norris’s shadow to become McLaren’s undisputed number one driver.

Now, with the season hanging in the balance, the paddock is rife with whispers and conspiracy. The tension is palpable. How does a driver so dominant suddenly forget how to win? How does a 34-point lead evaporate into a one-point deficit? The whispers have pointed to everything, even internal sabotage. But new analysis from a former world champion suggests a far more complex and devastating truth. The sabotage isn’t coming from the team; it’s coming from inside Piastri’s own helmet.

1997 World Champion Jacques Villeneuve has offered a stunning, controversial explanation that reframes Piastri’s entire season. According to Villeneuve, we were all watching the wrong story. We believed we were witnessing Piastri’s elevation to elite status. Villeneuve argues we were actually witnessing Lando Norris’s profound struggle with the McLaren MCL39.

“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 on the Sky Sports F1 show. “And we kept saying, ‘Oh, that’s because Piastri has stepped up. He’s now on Lando’s pace and even quicker.’”

Villeneuve then posed the billion-dollar question that has turned the championship on its head: “But was it actually Piastri stepping up, or Lando that just wasn’t on it?”

The evidence supports this bombshell theory. Norris himself admitted publicly that he “wasn’t very comfortable with the car” during the first half of the season. Piastri, it seems, was not battling a prime Lando Norris. He was battling a teammate who was ill at ease with his machinery, and Piastri was winning. This, Villeneuve suggests, created a dangerous illusion of superiority and, ultimately, a fatal sense of complacency.

Every psychological collapse has a flashpoint, a moment where the first crack appears. For Oscar Piastri, that moment was the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in Baku. The weekend was a catastrophic unravelling. Piastri crashed into the wall during qualifying, relegating him to a lowly ninth-place start. On race day, it got worse. He jumped the start, earning a penalty, and then compounded his errors by crashing at turn five on the very first lap.

Sky Sports analyst Martin Brundle didn’t mince words: “And obviously Baku would have scattered his brain. That was a very difficult weekend for him… and it seems to have gone off the rails.”

The ripple effects from Baku have been devastating. In the four races since that disastrous weekend, Piastri has not seen a single podium. A retirement in Azerbaijan was followed by fourth in Singapore, fifth in the United States, and another fifth in Mexico City. It was in Mexico that the final blow landed. Norris seized a commanding victory, and with it, the championship lead, while Piastri languished behind, unable to match his teammate’s blistering pace.

This is where Villeneuve’s analysis becomes truly chilling. He argues that Piastri’s early-season dominance bred a “complacency” that is now costing him the title. “When all you have to fight is your teammate, maybe you don’t push to that last limit, that last tenth of a second,” Villeneuve suggested. He compared it to other sports, where dominant regular-season teams suddenly “collapse” in the playoffs.

The most terrifying part of Villeneuve’s theory is this: Piastri, even during his dominant phase, was already at his absolute maximum. He had no extra performance in reserve.

“You know, when you drive within the limit, the car is perfect, it’s easy,” Villeneuve explained, painting a picture of Piastri’s early success. But when a driver is forced to find those “crucial extra two-tenths of a second”—which is exactly what happened when Norris finally got comfortable with the car—that same “flawless” car suddenly becomes “undrivable.”

“Suddenly we get Baku, and we get Max that’s winning everything, and Lando stepped up,” Villeneuve stated emphatically. “Lando is driving faster and better than he’s been all season. And Piastri is not stepping up. He was already at his limit.”

This triggered a destructive psychological spiral. The moment Piastri realized his teammate had found an extra gear, the doubt began. “It just takes your teammate to step up a little bit, and you’re realizing, ‘Oh, how do I do that?’ And suddenly nothing works,” Villeneuve described. “It gets in your head, and you just get slower and slower and slower.”

This is the “sabotage.” It is the self-doubt that leads a driver to “start inventing setups that don’t exist,” to “doubt his way of driving,” to obsess over data and wonder why he can’t take a corner one-tenth quicker like his teammate.

The most compelling evidence for this theory comes from Piastri himself. After the Mexican Grand Prix, the Australian driver all but confirmed Villeneuve’s analysis. “We certainly tried a lot of different things,” Piastri admitted. “It was difficult to get a read on whether what I was changing in my driving was working that well or not.”

This is the confession of a driver who is no longer driving on instinct, but is lost in a sea of second-guessing. He is no longer the confident leader; he is a man searching for answers that seem to be slipping further away.

To make matters worse, this is no longer a simple two-way fight. While Piastri has been spiraling, Max Verstappen has mounted an extraordinary late-season charge. With wins in Italy, Azerbaijan, and the United States, the three-time world champion is now just 35 points behind Norris, transforming this from a McLaren civil war into a terrifying three-way title fight. Piastri is now being hunted by both a resurgent teammate and the most clinical driver on the grid.

As for the theory of actual team sabotage? Martin Brundle emphatically shuts that down, putting the focus squarely back on Piastri’s mental state. “I really honestly believe McLaren don’t mind which of their two drivers wins the world championship… as long as it’s one of them,” Brundle noted. “Something’s happened in Oscar’s head.”

The team isn’t the problem. The car isn’t the problem. The problem, it seems, is the crushing realization that the peak he thought he had reached was just a plateau, and his teammate has found a new summit.

With only a handful of races remaining until the season finale, Piastri faces the most critical test of his career. Villeneuve’s advice is simple, yet monumentally difficult: “You have to remember what you were doing that was good, and just step up a little bit.”

The question is, does he have another level to step up to? Or was Villeneuve right? Was Piastri’s early-season dominance a beautiful illusion, shattered by the return of Lando Norris and the brutal, psychological “sabotage” of his own self-doubt? The answers will be written on the asphalt, but one thing is certain: this championship will be decided not just by speed, but by the sheer mental fortitude to survive a collapse that no one saw coming.