Formula 1’s latest rules changes did little to make the racing better or safer, said Oscar Piastri after yesterday’s Miami Grand Prix.
Last weekend the championship held its first races since introducing a package of changes which were intended to address problems drivers identified following the first three rounds. These included the potentially high closing speeds between cars, which contributed to Oliver Bearman’s crash at Suzuka, as well as concerns over cars’ performance in qualifying.
Piastri started neither of the first two grands prix this year and experienced little wheel-to-wheel racing at Suzuka as he took the lead at the start. He was not impressed by the racing in Sunday’s grand prix and said F1’s changes have been a limited improvement at best.
“The reduced harvest limit in qualifying has helped a bit,” he said. “It’s not fixed the problem or all the problems, but it’s helping with one.
“The races are basically exactly the same and I think today was my first proper experience of overtaking people and then having to defend and stuff like that. It’s pretty crazy, to be honest.”
Piastri repeatedly swapped places with George Russell as their cars’ energy levels varied due to their harvesting and deployment patterns and the availability of Overtake Mode. He said the fight felt “random” and pointed out the closing speeds between cars can still be very high.
“At one point George was one second behind me and managed to overtake me by the end of that straight,” he said. “It’s just a bit random.
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“The closing speeds are huge and trying to anticipate that as the defending driver is incredibly tough to do. Obviously for the overtaking driver, I wasn’t that pleased with one of the moves that George did, but I kind of found myself almost doing the same move about five laps later, just because the closing speed is enormous. So from that side of things, not much has really changed.”
The McLaren driver doubts much more can be done through minor changes to the current rules to improve the racing.
“I think the collaboration from the FIA and F1 has been good, but there’s only so many things you can change with the hardware we have. So some changes in the future are I think still needed for sure. How quickly we can do it is the big question.”
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