‘Please stop this’: Has Oscar Piastri’s season been cursed by a burger chain?

3 weeks ago 5

By Tom Cary

November 15, 2025 — 1.45pm

Various theories have been advanced in recent weeks to explain Oscar Piastri’s mystifying loss of form in the latter part of the Formula 1 season, a slump which has allowed his McLaren teammate, Lando Norris, to steal a march in the title race. But a new thesis has now emerged: the Australian has been “cursed” by a burger chain.

Grill’d, the Melbourne-based fast food outlet, has apologised for jinxing Piastri with a promotion it has been running since the Italian Grand Prix in September. Since offering free “Piastri 81” burgers to its customers whenever the McLaren driver finishes on the podium, he has failed to do so. In that time, Piastri’s lead of 34 points over Norris has become a 24-point deficit.

Perhaps noting the decline in form, Grill’d changed its offer to reward fans for every time Piastri finished a race – only for the Australian to crash out of the São Paulo sprint race last weekend.

The phenomenon has not gone unnoticed by Piastri’s fans. “Please stop this promotion and give us some hope for the last three races,” said one on the chain’s Facebook page this week.

As any self-respecting business would do, Grill’d has jumped on the story and spun it into a PR opportunity, creating “Certified Cursed” T-shirts with pictures of the Piastri 81 burger on it and taking out billboard advertising stating: “Sorry not sorry”. “To everyone who believes in the ‘Curse’,” the chain said on social media, “we’d like to apologise. To you, and to F1 fans everywhere. We never meant to create a burger so delicious it could change the course of F1 history.”

Piastri’s burger curse joins a long list of bizarre jinxes in sport. These include the Socceroos, who in 1969 enlisted the help of a local shaman in Mozambique to help them qualify for the following year’s World Cup. The Socceroos won their next game 3-1, but allegedly failed to pay the shaman for his services, whereupon the curse was reversed and put on the Australians.

“From that moment that he put the curse on, everything went wrong for the team,” Johnny Warren, the then captain of the team, said later. The Socceroos qualified for one World Cup over the next 32 years.

Perhaps the most famous sporting curse of all is the Curse of the Bambino, which supposedly hit the Boston Red Sox following the sale of Babe Ruth to rivals New York Yankees in 1918. Having won five of the sport’s first 15 World Series titles, the Red Sox would not win another for 86 years.

Piastri, who officially endorsed the Grill’d burger earlier this season, will hope to get out of the pickle in which he finds himself when the series heads to Las Vegas next week. The race there is the first of a season-ending triple-header, which also includes Qatar and Abu Dhabi and will decide the destination of the world title.

There is no denying Piastri is struggling. So strong in the first half of the year, he has now finished behind Norris at five successive grands prix. But if it is not burgers, what is it?

Has Oscar Piastri’s F1 season been cursed by a Grill’d promotion?

The answer may, after all, lie in what happened at Monza. The team-orders row that ignited at the end of that race, when McLaren asked Piastri to give Norris his second place back after they had botched the Englishman’s pit stop, was only worth three points (it was actually a six-point swing in the title race).

But Piastri has now admitted that the row contributed to his state of mind at the following race in Baku, when he produced his ugliest performance of the season, which included a crash in qualifying, a false start and a crash on the opening lap of the race.

“Yeah, ultimately [Baku] was a combination of quite a few things,” Piastri told Tom Clarkson on the F1 Beyond the Grid podcast when asked to explain his Azerbaijan weekend. “The race before that was Monza, which I didn’t feel was a particularly great weekend from my own performance, and there was what happened with the pit stops…”

Could it really have derailed his season? Looking back, Piastri was peeved at the time. The 24-year-old eventually acquiesced but not without pointing out over team radio that it seemed a change to previous McLaren team policy that “a slow pit stop was part of racing”.

Oscar Piastri did not have a good event in Baku, Azerbaijan in September.

Afterwards there was lots of talk about whether it was fair, and whether the team were favouring Norris. Piastri admitted there were “valid reasons” why the team made the call (Norris had done the same thing for him in Budapest in 2024 en route to his maiden win in F1). He stressed it was not worth getting worked up about. He still had a 31-point lead at that point.

It is worth stressing that Piastri in no way blamed his Baku performance entirely on Monza. He admitted he drove poorly that weekend as well as having some technical issues, including an engine problem. But he did repeat later in the podcast that it contributed to his mindset, saying there were “some things in the lead-up that were maybe not the most helpful”.

“There were a lot of little things that added up,” he concluded. “Trying to pinpoint which one of those was the cause and which was the effect… we’ll never know. Ultimately, Baku was the perfect storm. Let’s not beat about the bush, that was the worst weekend I’ve had in racing. But probably the most useful in some ways.”

Perhaps it comes down to experience. It is easy to forget that this is only Piastri’s third season as an F1 driver, as opposed to Norris’s seventh. Perhaps he needs to learn better how to process the setbacks. Perhaps he will come back over the last three races and turn the tables again. Who knows? No doubt Grill’d will be ready with a special promotion either way.