Oscar Piastri is experiencing new difficulties with the 2026 McLaren compared to team-mate Lando Norris, including a weekend that neutered what team boss Andrea Stella calls his ‘superpower’.
In qualifying, Norris has had the upper hand as he leads Piastri 16-8, but the actual average gap between them has only been 0.040s.
The more stark gap has been in a good number of grands prix, including Austin. Piastri (green line) is on average half a second slower than Norris (orange line), through the race on the same strategy, and ends up 22 seconds behind. This follows other weekends with big deficits like Barcelona (35 seconds) and Zandvoort (32 seconds), where he admitted there were “too many [races] now that have been really a long way off”.
Asked what the issue with his race pace was, Piastri replied: "It was slow. I don't have any more than that at the moment.
“When [Isack] Hadjar came out of the pits, it looked like he had some kind of issue and his deployment was a bit all over the place. So I was kind of catching him in awkward places and lost a fair bit of time there.
“Then I was kind of defending from George [Russell] for the rest of the race from that. But I think on top of that the pace just clearly wasn't very good. So plenty to try and understand.”
It was a weekend-long struggle for Piastri, as while on paper he outqualified Norris - and Piastri does deserve some credit for setting a faster legal lap - he was actually 0.424s behind Norris’s fastest (track limits-deleted) Q3 lap.
Piastri’s pace deficit was so clear by Saturday that McLaren had factored in the potential need to swap the cars' order in their pre-race meetings, because - as per team boss Stella - "we had seen during the weekend that Lando was a little bit faster than Oscar”.
Piastri called Austin “tough from lap one” on Friday, adding, "Just trying to get performance out of the car has been very, very challenging.
“At points in qualifying, for Lando at least, it looked like there was potential in it and I think we both felt there is potential in it. But the difference of extracting that potential or not is like half a second different.
"It's been very, very tough to get that laptime out of the car. I've not managed it at all, but I think when either of us have really pushed the boundaries, we can't keep it on the track. It's been a very challenging one, for sure.”
The 2026 McLaren does have knife-edge qualities, but Norris has undoubtedly dealt with those better this year.
The clearest contrast was McLaren’s purple patch either side of the summer break, where Norris would have won three out of four races without a poorly timed virtual safety car in Madrid, while Piastri didn’t even feature on the podium (and hasn’t since Miami in early May). Budapest was Piastri’s best chance - unfortunate contact while lapping Carlos Sainz robbed him of it - but even there, he was a clear step behind Norris on pace.
But Piastri and McLaren feel he’s made progress in recent rounds, with McLaren F1 CEO Zak Brown saying in Singapore that he was “liking everything I see out of Oscar, he's feeling much more confident, on top of things”.
Piastri believes he has fixed some of his weaknesses from earlier in the season - but new ones are appearing, meaning the outcome looks the same.
“It’s not been anywhere near as competitive as what I wanted it to be,” Piastri said in Austin.
“In the corners that I thought would be a struggle and the types of corners that have been a struggle this year, it's been pretty good this weekend, but it's more just been about trying to get everything in the lap together.
"That's been the real challenge. I don't think it's quite the same picture as what it has been earlier in the season, but the end result is still the same.
“It's a bit of a shame, but I'm not too disappointed in that because I feel like the areas I've been working on are still showing progress.”
'Superpower' neutered?
Piastri did also struggle at Austin last year, finishing fifth while Norris was over 20 seconds up the road in second.
So there is an element of this being a less favourable track for Piastri, as Stella pointed out after the race.
"This is a track in which Lando excels, and is one of the tracks in which Oscar instead struggles a little bit more,” Stella said.
"So this year, I think in particular for Oscar, it's tricky because Oscar's superpower is to build. Once he creates references, he can really effectively build lap after lap. But here, every lap is different. So these are the conditions that challenge Oscar.
“Actually, [these] are the conditions where Lando uses his own superpower, which is being very adaptive to the conditions, especially as the car slides.”
It’s that difficulty that Piastri has been fighting to overcome all season. His early-2025 form has looked almost completely inaccessible to him this year. At Austin it was because of the changing conditions, whereas previously it’s been trying to repeat the kind of driving inputs that mesh well with the 2026 power units.
“The car needs quite a lot of effort to deliver laptime and it requires a level of intensity in the driving input which is much superior to last year,” Stella explained in Singapore - when there were hopes Piastri’s 2026 struggles were behind him.
"This is something that took some time for the drivers to get comfortable [with] - well, 'comfortable' is wrong, but to understand. And it's also one of the reasons why Oscar, at some stage, he almost lost some of the competitiveness compared to Lando.
"Oscar just needed to understand how to force the car to do some things and [accept] the fact that driving fast will not necessarily mean driving clean.
“Instead, probably the signature of Oscar, when we have seen him fast in the past, [is] he was clean, it was really good data to see, it was very repeatable and he was fast.
"With this car, all these things together, they don't seem to happen very often, so it's a lot of work for the drivers.”
Piastri’s had to adapt because none of the upgrades McLaren has brought has made the car’s optimal operating window any wider.
“None of these upgrades are really making the car easier to drive, which is kind of our biggest problem,” Piastri said.
So the car isn’t going to come to Piastri this season, and there’s no guarantee that McLaren will be able to eliminate this knife-edge trait from its car for 2027.
The team wants to open up the window of performance so the laptime can be more easily accessed by both drivers, but ultimately McLaren’s number one priority is making a fast car.
And Piastri is likely to have a long winter trying to find the answer to how to consistently get back on terms with Norris in these new regulations.
from The Race https://ift.tt/ktGmKRE
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