McLaren boss Andrea Stella believes Oscar Piastri's alarming drop in performance could be linked to a run of low-grip F1 circuits.
After winning the Dutch GP, Piastri held a 34-point lead over team-mate Lando Norris, and a 104-point lead over Max Verstappen.
However, just six races later, Norris is now the championship leader by a single point with Verstappen now just 35 points behind the Australian heading into the final four races of the season.
In Azerbaijan, Piastri had a dreadful weekend where he crashed in qualifying, jumped the start of the race, and then crashed on the first lap, before going onto crash out with Norris at Turn 1 of the United States GP Sprint.
He has not finished ahead of Norris when both cars have finished since the Belgian GP in July, and has not claimed a podium since the third in Italy, a run of four consecutive races.
However, team principal Stella believes that investigations have pointed towards Piastri's struggles in low-grip conditions as a potential cause of his slump.
"After qualifying [in Mexico], we reviewed with Oscar extensively, from a data, comment, video point of view," Stella told media, including RacingNews365.
"I think we extracted some important information in terms of how the car needs to be driven in these special low-grip conditions, like in Mexico and similar to Austin.
"It looks like you have to drive the car in a way that adapts to the fact that the car slides a lot and can slide and produce lap time, and this is not necessarily the way in which Oscar feels naturally that he is producing lap time.
"So we identified a few things that we could do with the car and a few things that he could do with the driving, and I think Oscar should be very proud of himself, of how he has handled the transition from qualifying to the race.
"We could see in the race that he was applying this; it definitely had a more competitive pace than in qualifying, and it's a bit of a shame that he was not in condition to fully use this pace, because we could not find the way to just get him out of traffic. He spent the entire race looking at the gearbox of the car ahead.
"But it's important for Oscar that we go through this kind of experience in which we learn new tools to add to the toolbox, because that's how you become the most complete version of a Formula 1 driver.
"It is also important for the next four races, in which we're going to find again, different conditions, so we need to be ready for all of them."
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