Oscar Piastri takes a critical look at his season so far as the summer break approaches: The McLaren driver cites several reasons for his team’s inconsistent performance
McLaren driver Oscar Piastri offers a mixed assessment of his 2026 Formula 1 season so far. From his perspective, there have been “unfortunately more lows than highs” leading up to the summer break.
The numbers confirm this impression: With 92 points, Piastri is in seventh place in the drivers’ standings; his teammate Lando Norris is 36 points ahead of him. Among the drivers from the top teams, only Isack Hadjar has performed even worse than Piastri. However, Piastri did have two highlights: a second-place finish at Suzuka and a third-place finish in Miami.
“There were good moments, not-so-good moments—and everything in between,” Piastri said in retrospect. “For us as a team, though, the first half of the season obviously didn’t go the way we’d imagined. Especially compared to last year. Our performance fluctuated quite a bit.”
Why McLaren “crashed” after Miami
Suzuka and Miami were followed by race weekends that were less successful for McLaren. So far, Piastri can only partially explain this. He suspects that the changes to the Formula 1 rules ahead of the Miami race weekend may have played a role.
“Since the changes, the car drives much more naturally. Back in Suzuka, you still had to drive the car in a pretty unusual way to be fast. I think we’d implemented those rather unnatural requirements very well.” Afterward, however, McLaren ran into trouble.
McLaren: Left behind in the development race?
According to Piastri, this is also related to the technical development race: “All the teams brought updates. We’ve also stepped up our game, but perhaps not all of our updates worked out the way we’d hoped.”
That’s why Suzuka and Miami were “in hindsight more the exception than our actual performance level,” Piastri explained. The goal for the rest of the 2026 Formula 1 season must therefore be to make the exception the rule. “Hopefully we’ll succeed. I, too, need to become a bit more consistent.”
Piastri has recently fallen short, especially in qualifying: Since Barcelona, Norris has been the faster McLaren driver in every qualifying session, after Piastri had been ahead three times in a row at the start of the season. Currently, the head-to-head record stands at 4–7 in Piastri’s favor. In the races, the score is tied at 5-5.
Clear progress with the Mercedes power units
Still, Piastri and McLaren are now getting along better with the Mercedes power unit than they were a few months ago. Piastri said: “Now it’s much more about how the car feels and what the balance is like.”
However, this last point still puzzles McLaren: “Especially over the past two race weekends, the car was definitely harder to drive for some reason. We don’t yet know exactly whether that was due to the track characteristics, the wind, or the asphalt.”
