SAO PAULO -- Oscar Piastri risks reputational damage if he does not win this year's Formula 1 world championship, according to title rival Max Verstappen's father, Jos Verstappen.
In early September, Piastri appeared to have one hand on the 2025 title, 34 points clear of McLaren teammate Lando Norris in a championship he had led for six months.
That lead has disappeared since, and Piastri has not been on the podium since the controversial Italian Grand Prix, which featured him obeying a team order to let Norris pass for second position after McLaren botched a late pit stop.
Norris now leads by one point, with Max Verstappen considered a title outsider 36 points back with four races left.
Jos Verstappen, who was a teammate of F1 legend Michael Schumacher in the 1990s, has questioned what has happened to make the Australian's season unravel so quickly.
"I find it quite strange what's happening at McLaren," Verstappen told Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf. "Piastri can't have suddenly forgotten how to drive, right? If I were him, or his manager [ex-driver Mark Webber], I'd bang my fist on the table internally at least once.
"Because right now everyone is wondering whether he can handle the pressure, and that's not good for your reputation ... Piastri's reputation in this case."
The sudden turnaround in the championship has spawned plenty of other theories beyond Piastri not being able to handle pressure. Norris was booed by fans after winning the Mexican Grand Prix, with local journalists later reasoning that a growing theory among the crowd being that McLaren has favored him over Piastri in recent months.
McLaren has repeatedly denied those theories and has attempted to keep the intrateam battle between its drivers as fair as possible.
Piastri dismissed the suggestion of the team being against him during his media availability for the Sao Paulo Grand Prix at Interlagos on Thursday. "No, it's not the case," Piastri said directly to a question on conspiracies of McLaren sabotage.
"I think the last couple of weekends have been a little bit more tricky, but we've got pretty clear answers on why that's the case. There's not really too many mysteries on what's happened.
"I think there's some questions of why some differences have cropped up in terms of how I need to drive and stuff like that, but yeah, everything is explainable."