Former F1 team boss Guenther Steiner has used a segment on his podcast to label McLaren star Oscar Piastri a ‘w****r’ following the United States Grand Prix weekend.
With a maximum of 33 world championship points available in Austin, Piastri only managed to score 10, crashing out on lap one of the sprint race and finishing fifth in the main event.
His team-mate and championship rival Lando Norris, however, scored 18 points across the weekend, while four-time world champion Max Verstappen scored the maximum 33 points after his win in the sprint race and main grand prix victory.
It means that Piastri’s lead at the top of the drivers’ championship is now at just 14 points over Norris, and 40 points over Verstappen, with both racers having cut Piastri’s lead at each of the last four grands prix weekends.
Now, former Haas boss Steiner, known for his colourful language across multiple seasons in the sport and subsequent appearances on Netflix’s Drive to Survive, has used his podcast to label Piastri a ‘w****r’.
Steiner’s podcast has a ‘Rockstar & W****r of the week’ segment, and he believed that Piastri had earned the latter award at COTA this year.
“I think this weekend, Oscar earned the w****r of the race,” Steiner said on the Red Flags podcast. “I know it’s harsh!
“There was no performance from a guy which, three, four races ago, was looking like a world champion. I mean this is not world champion-like what was done this weekend.
“Maybe we wake him up by voting him the w****r of the week, maybe he gets up next time and gets better?”
The former Haas boss then joked about the impact of the podcast segment on how drivers treat him in the paddock, saying: “Maybe somebody tells him and so he doesn’t speak with me anymore for normally two, three weeks, that’s what happens when we give the w****r of the race out, they ignore me at the next race, they see me and they just walk by me!”
Should McLaren back one driver?
There have been calls for McLaren to simply back either Piastri or Norris in their fight against Verstappen, something that the team seem unwilling to do at this stage.
They have already won the constructors’ championship for the second successive year, but are now hoping to claim their first drivers’ championship since the team managed it with Lewis Hamilton back in 2008.
Steiner was later asked by the Red Flags podcast hosts what he attributes Piastri’s dip in performance too, and he added: “I feel the team should support him now there is pressure coming from someone else outside the team. When you’re a team member you want the support to win the championship and he doesn’t get it and maybe is starting to doubt if the team is behind him…that obviously knocks on your confidence.
“When you go into a race you need to be completely free to do things you want to do and when you’re not free you make mistakes. I think that is what this drop in performance [is] because of a drop in confidence.”
