Horner warns: “Piastri will be hurt and motivated by the lost title. He is inexperienced, he can grow”

The great defeat Oscar Piastri was probably the great disappointment of the 2025 season finale. Lando Norris won the title, Max Verstappen was able to keep alive until the last lap a World Championship that at the end of the summer seemed impossible for him to even approach; Piastri, on the other hand, who also arrived in Abu Dhabi with still arithmetic chances of the title, wasted a lead of 34 points on his teammate and 104 on Norris with nine GPs to go, ending the year in third position. Precisely this disappointment, however, according to former Red Bull team principal Christian Horner, could turn into the right fuel to make Piastri an absolute protagonist of the 2026 World Championship, despite the undeniable additional difficulty of having the reigning world champion in the garage next door. Speaking to the Australian TV 9 News, Horner in fact paid great credit to the qualities of the #81, highlighting how some of his shortcomings in 2025 were also due to the inevitable inexperience that distinguishes him compared to Verstappen and Norris. Horner’s thoughts “Oscar will have learned a lot from last year – declared Horner – I thought he was the big favorite before the summer break, but unfortunately at the end of the season everything went up in smoke for him. He will have learned from that experience, which will have hurt and also motivated him. You forget that this boy has only played a couple of seasons in Formula 1. He is so relatively inexperienced that he will only improve and will be fully motivated for the season ahead.”