Struggling against Norris this season, Oscar Piastri acknowledges that his driving style is difficult to match with the new cars.
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Oscar Piastri’s 2026 season is far from meeting expectations. After leading the championship for 15 rounds and winning seven Grands Prix in 2025, the Australian is now struggling to regain the level of performance that allowed him to compete for the title.
The contrast with Lando Norris has become particularly visible. His teammate holds a position three places higher in the championship and now has a 55-point lead. Even more worrying, Piastri has just passed the milestone of a full year without a win, his last victory dating back to the 2025 Dutch Grand Prix.
For the McLaren driver, part of the explanation lies in the very particular characteristics of the new generation cars.
A driving style less suited to the 2026 F1s
The 2026 cars have significantly less aerodynamic downforce than their predecessors, which requires drivers to make more small corrections at the wheel. A behavior that does not naturally match Piastri’s very smooth and precise style.
Norris seems, on the contrary, much more comfortable with this requirement. Andrea Stella also believes that the Australian’s difficulties are mainly technical: when he does not find the right operating window, Piastri can no longer drive purely by instinct.
After his sixth place at Zandvoort, more than 32 seconds behind Norris, the race winner, Piastri and McLaren therefore sought to understand the origin of this gap.
“Yes, I think we have found some answers,” he explains. “It is not a single problem that keeps recurring. We are always looking for something a little different and we need to manage to identify it more quickly, both me and the team around me.”
Visible progress in qualifying
However, not everything was negative in the Netherlands. Piastri believes in particular that his qualifying performance was much closer to the level he should normally display.
The challenge now is to reproduce this progress over the course of a Grand Prix, when the car’s behavior evolves with fuel, tires, and track conditions.
“The positive point of Zandvoort is that at least the qualifying seemed clearly better and back to the level where it should be,” Piastri emphasizes. “Now, we are simply trying to extend that to races.”
The Australian assures that the analysis carried out after Zandvoort helped better understand why his pace had dropped so much on Sunday.
“We have good answers regarding the reasons why Zandvoort was particularly difficult. We are making good progress. We just need time and some experiments to find what will make us faster.”
“My natural way of driving is not necessarily the best”
Piastri nevertheless refuses to reduce his problems to a simple question of grip. According to him, the characteristics of the 2026 cars sometimes force him to go against his instincts.
“It is not as simple as saying: ‘It just lacks grip.’ This year in particular, the way I naturally like to drive a car is not necessarily the best way to drive these cars,” he admits.
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Depending on the circuits and setups, his approach can work perfectly or become much less effective. It is this inconsistency that complicates McLaren’s work.
“Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I think this will be part of the challenge. We have not encountered exactly the same problem every time.”
Piastri must therefore identify the necessary adaptations more quickly during a weekend rather than looking for a single solution to his difficulties.
The dangerous “spiral” described by Piastri
It is especially on the mental and instinctive level that the Australian describes an interesting phenomenon. When a driver feels perfectly comfortable in his car, the actions become natural and he can devote more mental capacity to other aspects of his driving.
But when this confidence disappears, the process can quickly reverse.
“When you are comfortable in the car, everything becomes much easier. It is very easy to enter a spiral in both directions,” explains Piastri.
“There can be a positive spiral: you feel comfortable, you have more capacity to think and many things become subconscious. Everything becomes almost easy.”
The opposite situation is much more problematic.
“When you are not comfortable, you have to think much more. You no longer drive by instinct and that is when everything can quite quickly collapse.”
Piastri refuses to give in to worry
The McLaren driver assures, however, that he is still far from having lost confidence. His main problem lies rather in the time needed to find the right solutions during race weekends.
“I absolutely do not think we have reached that point,” he specifies. “But finding solutions quickly has clearly not been easy so far.”
Piastri and McLaren usually end up understanding how to improve the car, but sometimes too late to fully exploit the weekend’s potential.
“We have almost always ended up finding solutions. The question is rather how to identify problems more quickly and adapt faster during the weekend.”
After a 2025 season spent fighting at the front, Piastri now faces a very different challenge in 2026: changing some of the instincts that had precisely been his strength.
The Australian remains convinced that answers are beginning to emerge. But while Norris is making better and better use of the MCL40, Piastri now knows that his main challenge will be to regain enough confidence to start driving by instinct again.
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