Oscar Piastri has admitted that he and the McLaren team are \u201cgetting a little bit more optimistic\u201d following the second pre-season test in Bahrain, though the Australian has cautioned that he does not believe the squad are \u201cleading the pack by any stretch of the imagination\u201d.<\/p>\n
Piastri<\/a> completed his stint in the MCL40 on Friday morning at the second and last run of testing before the campaign begins in Australia<\/a> on March 6-8, placing third on the timesheets whilst racking up a total of 66 laps for the day.<\/p>\n Speaking to the media afterwards, the 24-year-old was quizzed on whether he felt that the Woking-based outfit had a car in which they could fight at the sharp end from the off.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we\u2019re probably getting a little bit more optimistic,\u201d Piastri responded. \u201cThe testing\u2019s gone smoothly for us at least. We\u2019ve been able to get a lot of laps in, learn a lot of things, both good and bad.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we\u2019ve got some good ideas and good directions, especially with such a big change in the rules \u2013 you\u2019re going to try a lot of bad things alongside the good things. I think finding out anything you can before Round 1 is always important, so I feel like we\u2019re making good progress.<\/p>\n \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say we\u2019re leading the pack by any stretch of the imagination, but I feel like we\u2019re not too bad.\u201d<\/p>\n In terms of the process of adjusting to the new cars \u2013 amid the introduction of sweeping new technical regulations<\/a> \u2013 Piastri also spoke of the progress he has felt in this area at the wheel of the McLaren<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s definitely been a learning curve, and there\u2019s still some things that we need to do as drivers that are certainly very different to what we had to do last year,\u201d the nine-time race winner explained.<\/p>\n \u201cBut I think the kind of optimisation around driving that way, as drivers I think we\u2019re getting our heads around the new things we need to do, and as teams making accommodations for having to drive a certain way now.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it has improved \u2013 it still is very different to what we had before, but I think naturally we\u2019ve all found performance and with performance it\u2019s made some creature comforts a little bit nicer as well. I think we are making progress \u2013 let\u2019s see what Melbourne\u2019s like.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Oscar Piastri has admitted that he and the McLaren team are \u201cgetting a little bit more optimistic\u201d following…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":495820,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-495819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=495819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495819\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/495820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=495819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=495819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=495819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}