Lando Norris double standards pointed out as F1 champion makes Oscar Piastri claim

Jacques Villeneuve offered a blunt assessment of Oscar Piastri's collapsing Formula 1 title challenge as he claimed team-mate Lando Norris "has been criticised for a lot less" this season. The Brit now leads the championship for the first time since April thanks to his dominant victory at the Mexico City Grand Prix.

Norris had lost ground to his McLaren team-mate earlier in the campaign, mostly because of a few erratic qualifying results which left himself with too much work to do in the race. But in recent round it has been Piastri who has begun to wobble.

Piastri has not beaten either Norris or third-placed Max Verstappen in a Grand Prix since winning the Dutch Grand Prix at the end of August. And, as a result of his slide, he has now slipped one point behind his team-mate who is the one with all the momentum with four rounds remaining.

Assessing the situation, Jacques Villeneuve pointed out what he believes to be double standards in terms of how the two McLaren drivers have been treated by pundits and fans this year. The 1997 champion said: "If you look at the first half of the season, he was very good at berating himself always, even too much. People really clamped on that, and they were starting to criticise him a lot.

"He's really come back now and he doesn't berate himself anymore. He's still very politically correct in all his answers because he's not giving us anything, but when you look at the way Piastri has crumbled, he's not getting criticised the same way Norris has been criticised for a lot less. We'll see how that pans out in the long run."

Prior to the Mexico race, it was Verstappen who was on a winning run and the Red Bull star was piling on the pressure. But Norris dominated the race weekend at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez and McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said the track suited perfectly his driver's style of racing.

He said: "These special low-grip conditions, they fit perfectly. It's a natural way of extracting lap time, which is almost opposite to Oscar's characteristics. It will just strengthen Lando's confidence and it will be important for the final four races. But I think both Lando and Oscar go into the final four races with reasons to be confident.

"I think the team also goes into the final four races with more understanding of how to extract performance from the car consistently, because over the last few races before Mexico, at times, we have left some performance in the garage."