Piastri came under scrutiny following the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix, where Nico Rosberg and Jacques Villeneuve both questioned his form after a muted run to fifth.
Rosberg suggested Piastri’s standing had taken “a bit of a plunge” compared to last season, while Villeneuve claimed “nobody’s talking about him anymore” after the McLaren driver’s momentum stalled across the opening phase of the year.
Hill, however, offered a typically dry response when those comments were put to him by Speedcafe.
“Well what do Jacques and Nico know?” Hill said. “They’re there to say controversial things, I think.”
The 1996 world champion did add, however, that there was “some truth” to the comments, although he tempered those assertions with his own belief that Piastri was still very much part of the top drivers in F1.
“I think it would have been pretty tough for Oscar to take what happened last year,” Hill said.
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“He didn’t win the title. He had a chance and [Lando] Norris fought back incredibly hard.
“Now it doesn’t look like either of the McLaren drivers have got a title shot this year. So he’s probably lamenting a little bit psychologically.
“A little bit of damage from what happened last year and also facing up to the reality of this year.
“But he’s a fighter. He’s a winner. We’ve seen him do it. He’s a great racing driver.
“And he’ll be back with a bit of hard work and a bit of support from his countrymen and women.
“So get behind your guy.”
Hill’s comments come as he prepares to return to Australia later this year for his speaking tour, An Evening with Damon Hill – In Conversation with Tom Clarkson.
The tour will see Hill appear alongside the F1 broadcaster across Australia and New Zealand, giving fans the chance to hear stories from his racing career and ask questions about both his era of the sport and the current F1 landscape.
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For Hill, the concept initially came with some hesitation before a successful run in the United Kingdom convinced him there was an appetite for a show built around his experiences in F1.
“Actually it’s an Australian company, Fane, who have discovered that talking to us, there’s a huge amount of interest in people talking about their careers,” Hill explained to Speedcafe.
“They came to me and said how about it? And I said, well what do I want to do that for? You know, to traipse around the whole of England and come up with something to say every night.
“But I loved it. I thought it was brilliant fun. And the fans seemed to like it as well.”
Hill said the show had attracted a broad mix of supporters, from those who followed his career at the time to younger fans who have discovered F1 more recently.
“Normally when a young person comes up and asks for an autograph, they say it’s for their granddad or their mum or something,” he said.
“So if one of them comes up and says they are actually a fan of mine, then that’s really a nice surprise. But it does happen.
“And we get all generations. And of course there’s the purple patch, I call it, of mostly people who were watching when they were eight years old when I was racing and now they’ve grown up.
“And they’ve still got that eight-year-old in their eyes. You can see it when they come towards you. They’re bewildered. And it’s funny seeing them kind of lose it when they’re grown men and women.”
The show covers several defining moments of Hill’s career, including his battles with Michael Schumacher, his time as Ayrton Senna’s teammate at Williams and the 1996 championship campaign that made him the first son of a Formula 1 world champion to win the title himself.
Hill said part of the appeal was being able to revisit major moments in his career in a setting that allowed for more context than can often be captured in books or television interviews.
“A lot of stuff gets lost in translation,” he explained.
“You can write books, which I have done, to try and explain things. But things become mythical. And there is a received wisdom as to what happened.
“And so when you hear it from a person who was there, and I can guarantee you I don’t ever try and spin anything. It is literally I was there and I’ll tell you what happened and how it was from my angle.”
Hill’s Australian connection is also central to his career story.
He won the final world championship Australian Grand Prix held in Adelaide in 1995, before winning the first race at Albert Park less than four months later in 1996.
Adelaide was also the scene of his infamous collision with Schumacher in the 1994 title decider, which ended Hill’s hopes of taking the championship by a single point.
Reflecting on the move from Adelaide to Melbourne, Hill said the two events had a very different feel.
“Yeah I mean it’s extraordinary,” he said.
“Within six months it was same country, different cities. And we did have to say goodbye to Adelaide where we’d had a lot of great times.
“The difference with Adelaide is, and I don’t need to tell you, it’s a smaller city and the whole F1 circus came to town and took over the city.
“So everything was about the grand prix when we went there.
“But when we went to Melbourne, it was a little bit more like, well there’s a good section of life going on that seems to be unaffected by what we’re doing.
“So we had to work hard to bring people on board. There’s lots of sporting events in Melbourne and we’re in competition with all of them really.
“Formula 1 had to work to get the same effect on a city that we had in Adelaide. It’s grown over time, but it is a case of, you’re conscious that some people just want to get to work in Melbourne.”
Hill will also use the tour to discuss the current Formula 1 season, which has seen Kimi Antonelli emerge as a major championship force in his second season.
The Italian currently leads the drivers’ championship by 41 points, but Lewis Hamilton’s breakthrough Ferrari victory in Barcelona has suddenly brought the seven-time world champion back into contention.
“I think it’s brilliant. It’s a great story. And it’s been a revelation,” Hill said of the season so far.
“Kimi Antonelli’s run of success ended in Spain, but his second season has been phenomenal. That’s made us all sit up and take notice of Kimi Antonelli.
“And Lewis Hamilton’s re-found some of his inspiration which has been good for all of us to see.
“No one likes to see such a great champion in such a hole that he was in last year. It was difficult to watch.
“But he’s sorted himself out by all accounts.”
Hill believes Ferrari’s recent progress has given Hamilton a chance at a record-breaking eighth championship, but warned the development race under F1’s new regulations could still shift the competitive order quickly.
“The thing is, there’s a lot of development that is producing results still available with these new regulations,” Hill said.
“They’re finding out stuff at a prodigious rate. Everyone is. So you can find cars leaping forward.
“They have to out-develop the other teams. The season is still a long season. A long way to go.
“But right now you’d say they’ve got a chance. If Mercedes have any more bad luck, then they could close up that gap quite quickly.”
An Evening with Damon Hill – In Conversation with Tom Clarkson begins in Perth on September 28, before heading to Brisbane on October 1, Auckland on October 2, Sydney on October 4 and Melbourne on October 5, with tickets available via Fane.
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