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The Australian’s hopes of winning a maiden F1 world championship went up in smoke at the Brazilian Grand Prix on Monday morning after a disastrous penalty ruined his charge. The 24-year-old’s campaign has taken a turn for the worse in recent weeks, with his McLaren teammate Lando Norris is now 24 points clear with three races and one sprint race left in the 2025 season. Fox Sports, available on Kayo Sports, is the only place to watch every practice, qualifying session and race in the 2025 FIA Formula One World Championship™ LIVE in 4K. New to Kayo? Join now and get your first month for just $1. After leading the F1 drivers’ championship standings by 34 points following the Dutch Grand Prix in August, Piasri has struggled for speed, while Norris has found his mojo. And given the fact Piastri has failed to beat his teammate and main title rival in the last six events, any chance of a miraculous late-season turnaround seems slim. It saw Piastri fans desperately searching for a reason why things have gone south, and many settled on a so-called “burger curse”, blaming Aussie burger chain Grill’d for his downfall. Piastri has become the chain’s highest-profile ambassador, cooking up his own signature burger, which was first put on the menu back in February. The signature “OP81” burger, highlighted by a charcoal bun, carrot and chipotle sauce, disappeared from the menu just months later. However, as Piastri continued to rack up win after win, the burger reappeared on the menu in September. Its return was marked with a ‘buy one get one free’ promotion every Monday if Piastri scored a spot on the podium. Grill’d proudly advertised the return of the promotion the day after the Italian Grand Prix on September 7. However, since then, Piatri has failed to achieve even a single podium finish. The Aussie restaurant giant has since changed the terms of the promotion to allow diners to activate the two-for-one deal after races, with Piastri now only needing to cross the finish line to active the deal. And now, after fans turned on the burger chain for ‘cursing’ Piastri’s season, Grill’d has finally responded. “We’ve seen the tweets, the TikToks, the memes … and yes, we’ve heard the whispers. Apparently, our OP81 Burger is ‘cursed’,” Grill’d said. “We’d like to apologise. To those who believe in the ‘curse’. We didn’t mean to create a burger so delicious it could change the course of F1 history. “The truth? We didn’t break F1, we just broke the internet. We call it flavour; you call it fate. “And if great taste and giving Aussies a free burger is a curse, we’ll cop that. Just ask the 330,000 Aussies who’ve already devoured the OP81 burger.” The burger chain then went a step further, announcing a mock limited-edition “Sorry Not Sorry” merchandise line featuring shirts, caps, mugs and tote bags branded with slogans like “Certified Cursed” and “Sorry (Not Sorry) since 2025”. Grill'd joked the line would be “coming never, probably.” However, a “Sorry Not Sorry” Spotify playlist, with songs such as Sorry by Justin Bieber, was also launched, as well as a billboard in Melbourne that promoted the campaign. Despite leaning into the criticism, Grill’d said it would “never bet against a guy like Oscar Piastri” and said the company will always support him. “Sure, we can take a joke about a curse, but we’ll never bet against a guy like Oscar Piastri,” the statement continued. “At the end of the day, Oscar’s our homegrown Aussie hero and we’ll always be in his corner. Today, tomorrow, and forever – we’ve got your back, Oscar. “We know a good story when we see one, and we love that Aussies care enough to turn a burger into folklore.” Piastri opens up on ‘worst weekend ever’ Piastri has opened up on “the worst weekend” he’s ever had in racing and how McLaren’s team orders at Monza contributed to the Baku horror show. The Aussie had a chance to extend his championship lead at Monza and was tracking for a P2 finish before McLaren ordered him to let Norris pass. The Brit had been in second place before a delayed pit stop saw Piastri move ahead. Yet he was instructed by McLaren to give the place back, something he did begrudgingly. “We said a slow pit stop was part of racing,” Piastri said on team radio. “So I don’t really get what’s changed here, but if you really want me to do it, then I’ll do it.” Once he cooled off, Piastri admitted it was the right decision. But speaking on F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast, he said that moment at Monza led to the Baku shocker. “Ultimately (it’s) a combination of quite a few things,” Piastri said on the podcast. “Obviously, the race before that was Monza, which I didn’t feel was a particularly great weekend from my own performance, and there was obviously what happened with the pit stops. “But then also in Baku itself, Friday was tough, things weren’t working, I was overdriving, I wasn’t very happy with how I was driving and ultimately probably trying to make up for that a little bit on Saturday. “I think there were kind of some things in the lead-up, let’s say, that were maybe not the most helpful and then things that happened on the weekend. “We had an engine problem in FP1 that kind of unsettled things a bit, and then I was driving not that well. We were on C6 tyres that weekend, which are notoriously tricky to handle. There were just a lot of little things that eventually kind of added up.” Piastri said Baku was the “perfect storm of quite a few things”, calling it “the worst weekend I’ve ever had in racing”. “There’s no beating around the bush, that was the worst weekend I’ve ever had in racing, but probably the most useful in some ways,” he said. “So, when you can start to look at things like that, normally that helps you out quite a lot. “(If) you look at some of the names that have had some pretty shocking weekends, or almost unbelievable weekends or races or moments in their career where things have gone wrong; it happens to anyone. “There’s not one person in racing that doesn’t have some kind of disastrous story of how a weekend went wrong for them. Looking at it from that perspective does help a lot, but you still need to learn the things you need to learn from weekends like that.”
