Listen to Pit Talk here ><\/a><\/p>\nPiastri said understanding how to get the most from the engine was the defining early difficulty.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the first part of the year we were doing a really good job of understanding the rules and understanding what we needed to do, because since the tweaks in Miami, how we need to drive and some of the things we need to do are a lot closer to natural than they were in Suzuka, for example.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was quite a weird experience of how you had to drive to go fast, so I think we were doing a very good job of maximising those unnatural things.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut since then, everyone else has brought a lot of upgrades as well. We\u2019ve brought some, and maybe not all of them have worked as well as we wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also said the McLaren car had become more difficult to master as the team has sought to squeeze performance from it without significant upgrades.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think maybe at the start of the season we had more to worry about on the power unit side of things in terms of stuff we could actually control and manage ourselves and things I could do with my driving style,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow there are still things we need to be careful of with the power unit, but it\u2019s not really in our control as much anymore; it\u2019s more purely about what the car is like, what the balance is like.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think especially the last couple of weekends it\u2019s definitely been a step harder to drive for whatever reason \u2014 whether it\u2019s just the layout, wind or type of tarmac, we don\u2019t really know, but hopefully this weekend that becomes a bit easier.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like in those couple of races [where McLaren did well] it was almost the exception to our pace rather than the baseline, so hopefully we can get back to that soon.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hamilton smashes the wall in P3! | 01:08<\/p>\n
McLaren boss Andrea Stella revealed earlier this month that the team had pursued some wayward design concepts that have had to be corrected, leading to a long delay between major upgrades.<\/p>\n
The team last brought a major update to the Miami Grand Prix in May.<\/p>\n
This weekend, however, will see the first phase of a two-step upgrade brought the car, which Piastri hopes can begin to generate some momentum for the defending constructors champion.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll find out tomorrow [in practice],\u201d he said. \u201cI think we should be a bit more competitive.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got a few upgrades this weekend, so hopefully that puts us a bit closer to being able to fight.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt should be faster. That\u2019s all I care about. I feel like we\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor us as a team it\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
ENGINE STILL A QUESTION MARK<\/p>\n
A question mark for Piastri remains over engine usage, which consumed paddock discussion after the Belgian Grand Prix.<\/p>\n
The layout of Spa-Francorchamps exposed some of the worst vices of the 2026 engine, which was running on combustion power only for much of the lap given the dearth of recharging opportunities.<\/p>\n
That in turn exposed how the engine\u2019s software is playing a decisive role in managing electrical power based on driver inputs through the corners and even uncontrollable variables like wind speed and track grip.<\/p>\n
Piastri responds to rumours | 01:14<\/p>\n
Piastri and George Russell were both hurt by the Mercedes engine algorithm in qualifying in Belgium, leaving them down on engine power in the final sector.<\/p>\n
Mercedes has since said it has found and fixed a bug in the code that caused the problem, but Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has insisted that accounts for only around half of the deficit, with the rest down to driving style.<\/p>\n
Piastri, though, believes there\u2019s a certain amount that remains out of control of the drivers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got no control over where the deployment happens, more or less,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can push the boost button, but that\u2019s more for overtaking than in qualifying.<\/p>\n
\u201cLike I said in Spa, when you\u2019ve got those differences there that you have no control over, it can be frustrating.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think Spa was particularly frustrating not just for me but for quite a lot of others because those small differences in the code and what the engines did made quite a big difference in lap time.<\/p>\n
\u201cEspecially at the front of the field, I think there were still only 0.09 seconds or something separating four positions, and there were definitely more than 0.09 seconds on the table for quite a few drivers from things they could not control.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m sure it\u2019ll get better. I don\u2019t expect it to ever fully go away, but as the manufacturers understand it more and work out the regulation restrictions more in terms of what the code can and can\u2019t do, hopefully things will become a bit better.\u201d<\/p>\n
He was hopeful hat Hungary\u2019s more technical layout, featuring few long straights, would minimise the influence of engine software in performance.<\/p>\n
\u201cHere I really don\u2019t 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the principle of driving a race car that loses effectively half of its power before the end of the straight is hard to get your head around sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Oscar Piastri has admitted his 2026 season has comprised \u201cmore lows than highs\u201d but hopes he and his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":820229,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,817,813,816,85],"class_list":["post-820228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820228","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=820228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820228\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/820229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=820228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=820228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=820228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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