Oscar Piastri has doubled down on his criticism of Formula 1’s “frustrating” new technology as McLaren attempts to salvage its season with much-needed upgrades in Hungary, which the Australian hoped would put the team a “bit closer to being able to fight”.

Driver concerns over the sport’s controversial machinery refuses to go away with Piastri the latest to lash out after last week’s Belgian Grand Prix.

After a frustrating weekend at Spa-Francorchamps, Piastri said post-race that F1 qualifying grids were now being decided by “computers behaving or misbehaving”, which was a “pretty crap way of going racing”.

Piastri finished fifth in Spa after being hampered by damage following a contentious clash with Charles Leclerc during the race, while his qualifying was compromised by power unit anomalies.

While Piastri did not expect the impact of power deployment issues to be as significant at this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix as at Spa, he again underlined his concerns over the impact of the technology that was “hard to get your head around”.

“When I joined Formula 1, those engines were incredibly mature, but also the penalty of things being slightly wrong, or slightly out of place was significantly less because it was such a small percentage of the overall power you got,” Piastri said.

“Whereas this year, it’s basically half your power, so any small differences or anything that doesn’t quite go right has a massive impact, especially as a track like Spa.

“We’ve got no control over where the deployment happens, more or less … in Spa when you’ve got those differences there that you have no control over, it can be frustrating.

“At a track like Spa or a track like Silverstone, it’s going to be worse. Here (Hungary), I really don’t expect there to be many problems at all with that kind of thing because the straights are so much shorter, so even if there are differences, they should be a lot less.

“But the principle of driving a race car that loses effectively half its power before the end of the straight is hard to get your head around sometimes.”

Four-time world champion Max Verstappen has been the most outspoken critic of this season’s new regulations, airing his concerns about them before the season had even started, and he said more drivers were now sharing his view.

“I’ve spoken my mind about these regulations already a long time,” Verstappen said.

“In the beginning most people were saying, ‘Ah, he’s complaining, he should shut up’.

“But I have to say that the last few races, more and more people are seeing the same thing that I could see already a long time ago.

“And it’s not about me winning anymore, it’s just because I care about the product.”

Ahead of the last race before the summer break, McLaren will introduce what the team has described as “a valuable package of upgrades” for the Hungarian Grand Prix, including a new floor and other aerodynamic parts.

The papaya squad has won the last two races at the Hungaroring and Piastri was hopeful the upgrades would make the team “a bit more competitive”.

“We’ve got a few upgrades this weekend, so hopefully that puts us a bit closer to being able to fight,” Piastri said.

“I think in Spa, certainly in the race, we were probably a bit more competitive than we expected, so that was a good thing.

“It should be faster. That’s all I care about. I feel like we’ve got a pretty good track record with upgrades, for the most part, and how they perform in the sim versus reality, so fingers crossed it just makes us quicker.”

Piastri sits sixth in the driver standings – 112 points behind Mercedes’ leader Kimi Antonelli – and is still in pursuit of a first win this season.

He has managed just two podiums in Japan and Miami, but has not been on the dais since the start of May.

Asked to rate his campaign so far at the halfway point of the season, Piastri said there had been “highs and lows”.

“Probably more lows than highs, unfortunately,” Piastri said.

“For us as a team, it’s obviously not been the first half of the year that we would have liked, especially compared to last year, so hopefully the second half of the year can be better.

“For myself as well, there have been some good moments, some not-so-good moments and pretty much everything in between.

“I want to be able to improve and be a bit more consistently on top of my game and hopefully we can do that this weekend and in the second half of the year.”