Jacques Villeneuve: Oscar Piastri "must be feeling terrible" after 2025 title slipped away

Jacques Villeneuve has shared some insight into how Oscar Piastri could be feeling after missing out on the championship title despite leading the drivers' standings earlier in the season.

The Australian driver was leading the standings with a nine-point advantage over his team-mate Lando Norris heading into the summer break. While he won the Dutch Grand Prix and secured a third-place finish at the Italian Grand Prix, the 24-year-old driver then suffered six race weekends without a grand prix podium.

A very late-season surge resulted in two second-place finishes in the final two races of the season - the Qatar and Abu Dhabi Grands Prix. 

Ultimately, Piastri walked away from the 2025 season in third place in the drivers' standings. Norris claimed his first championship title and Red Bull's Max Verstappen took second. 

"Terrible. He must be feeling terrible because he had the championship in hand," the 1997 Formula 1 champion Villeneuve said during the High Performance podcast.

"He was controlling it and it all disappeared and by the time he realised it was disappearing it was too late to react. He got speed in the last two races but it was too late. It was just way too late."

Oscar Piastri, McLaren

Photo by: Jayce Illman / Getty Images

McLaren left both drivers to fight it out for the championship title, allowing them to race freely on track with the one provision that they did not crash into one another. The 'papaya rules' came under a lot of scrutiny during the year, but the Woking outfit stuck to its guns to the end of the season.

"He might feel like that," Villeneuve added when asked if Piastri might feel that he had received unfair treatment from the team.

"Some people might be talking in his ear, say, ‘Hey, you see the team didn't help you. They went wrong.’ But that's not the truth. It's a big team, they didn't make one car slower. There was no work done that way. Ultimately, they wanted to be world champions with either driver.

"Piastri is this new upcoming young driver, great image if he wins. Norris is there for a while, been working with the team. So either would have been good, but ultimately he might start thinking like this and might start believing it, but that would be far-fetched."