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Oscar Piastri has admitted he is struggling to maximise McLaren’s Formula 1 package as team-mate Lando Norris continues to convert the team’s latest performance gains into victories.
The reigning world champion has won the last two grands prix, in Budapest and Zandvoort, from pole with a heavily upgraded MCL40. Piastri, by contrast, has recorded a DNF and a sixth-place finish. The result is a 55-point gap between the McLaren drivers: Norris sits fourth in the standings, while Piastri is seventh.
Norris has also dominated their qualifying comparison, leading 13-4 with sprint races included. He has now gone clear at the front of the internal battle, as reflected by his Dutch Grand Prix victory.
Piastri has not stood on the podium since Miami in May, and his last victory came at Zandvoort last August, when he appeared to be a champion-in-waiting. His recent results have therefore raised a difficult question: why has the same McLaren proved so much harder for him to exploit?
“Unfortunately it's not the first race where the pace just hasn't been there,” Piastri said. “Lando has just won the race [by] quite a lot, so I think the car is in a good place. It's been quick the last two weekends. I think these two tracks suit the car well. It's just for whatever reason, I've not been able to get the pace out of it.”
The current difficulty is particularly significant because Piastri is having to adapt to a lower-grip car, with downforce levels reduced under the new rules. Low-grip conditions have previously been a weakness for the Australian, whose title bid faded late last season at Baku, Singapore and Mexico City.
There have still been signs of speed. Piastri topped SQ2 and Q1 at Zandvoort and qualified fourth, just 0.142 seconds behind Norris. He was also only 0.040s and 0.009s behind Mercedes drivers George Russell and Kimi Antonelli.
But the race exposed a sharper contrast. Piastri passed Russell at Turn 7 on lap three before a slow 5.4-second pitstop dropped him behind on lap 19. He then lacked the pace to resist Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton, eventually finishing 32 seconds behind Norris.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella rejected any psychological explanation, describing the issue as “purely technical.” He identified the pitstop and Piastri’s second stint on hard tyres as decisive, saying the tyres failed to switch on and remained in a regime of very low grip.
With at least three teams separated by one tenth of a second, Stella stressed that a small loss of optimisation can now produce a major result swing. For Piastri, the task is clear: turn qualifying progress into consistent race performance before another opportunity disappears.
He’s a software engineer with a deep passion for Formula 1 and motorsport. He co-founded Formula Live Pulse to make live telemetry and race insights accessible, visual, and easy to follow.