A strong weekend at the Italian Grand Prix confirmed to McLaren that Oscar Piastri is returning to good form near the end of a tough European campaign.

After not starting the first two races of the season, Piastri got his 2026 underway strongly, outqualifying teammate Lando Norris three grands prix in a row and making an unlikely victory bid at the first race he completed in Japan, where he fell short only thanks to a badly timed safety car.

He kicked on with another podium at the following race in Miami, but he hasn’t been back on the rostrum in the four months since then.

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Norris, meanwhile, has gradually grown in strength, and the reigning world champion immediately clicked with McLaren’s first major upgrade in Hungary, romping to victory in Budapest and again at the following race in the Netherlands.

Piastri qualifying pace hasn’t been in question, with the margin between the drivers tighter than it was last year, at 0.047s, despite the 8-5 head-to-head count.

Race pace, however, has been difficult, with Piastri well behind Norris at the previous two rounds.

In Italy, however, he led the way in qualifying — even taking an unlikely shot at pole — and was a match for Norris in the race, losing fourth position to his teammate only on the last lap after a tight battle for position.

Team boss Andrea Stella, who is a long-time backer of Piastri’s potential, said after the Dutch Grand Prix that the team would put its arm around Piastri in a bid to solve his problem, just as it had done with Norris after the Englishman’s early struggles last year.

In Italy he said the signs were positive that the approach was working.

“I think it’s a race that confirms a trajectory with Oscar,” he said, per the F1 website. “We’ve had a couple of races in which we saw that for the requirements of this year’s car, especially in the race when the car slides, we needed to make some adaptations to his natural driving style.

“We kind of adopted the same approach that we used with Lando last year, and we saw pretty rapidly some developments.

“We were happy to see how competitive Oscar was in Zandvoort in qualifying trim. We said we need to do a little bit more for the race trim, we put in some work, and it’s good that this work seems like it’s been useful here in Monza.”

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Though calculating race pace is an inexact science given the effect of traffic and differing strategies, Fox Sports calculations suggest Italy was just the second time Piastri has had the legs on Norris in race trim when both have seen the chequered flag, albeit by less than 0.1s per lap.

“I think we both seemed pretty even, especially in the last few laps,” an upbeat Piastri said. “It was definitely challenging to know when to use your battery, when not to.

“It was a challenging race for sure. It was a very different race in Monza compared to what we’ve seen previously, [with] a lot of yoyo battling.

“It was quite difficult to know what exactly the right thing to do was because obviously you can’t just give up an easy overtake, but you also don’t want to be losing race time; you want to be just going with whoever you’re racing.

“That was quite difficult to manage, but definitely some lessons learned from that one.

“I think we saw a good battle [with Norris]. From my point of view I thought it was good racing — exciting, that’s for sure. Ultimately I think that was the best result we could have got as a team — pretty happy.”

Lando calls out Oscar ‘dangerous’ move | 00:41

The late fight for fourth was mildly controversial, with Norris ending up on the grass after an ambitious attempt to sneak down Piastri’s inside at the Roggia chicane.

Norris radioed his team to complain that Piastri had been driving dangerously, and Piastri subsequently received an “instruction from pit wall” to engage only in “clean racing”.

But on-board replays suggested there was little in the incident beyond Norris bailing onto the grass, and Stella admitted after the race that the team took no issue with the battle.

“Actually, when we reviewed it, I think we saw that the episode is much more benign than what it might have looked in the heat of the moment,” he said.

He added that the pit lane wanted Norris or Piastri to prove that they had the pace to challenge Verstappen for third rather than issuing a team order, something neither driver ultimately managed.

“We thought that for Lando to be able to have a chance on Max, he should firstly be able to pass Oscar,” he said.

“The two cars were on the same tyres, same tyre age, same car, so we thought there was no need to interfere with the normal development of the race. We let them race.

“I think it’s something that certainly we will review, and we will review in the context of this kind of racing.

“As soon as you fight with each other, then you may lose time.

“So was there a better way for McLaren to give a fight to Verstappen? We will review. It wasn’t obvious to us on the pit wall, and we thought that it was more important to let them race according to our philosophy of going racing.”

The result grew Norris’s advantage over Piastri to 55 points in the drivers championship in fourth and seventh respectively on the title table.