McLaren Formula 1 chief Andrea Stella is adamant Oscar Piastri’s United States Grand Prix struggles are largely track specific as the championship leader aims to rebound in Mexico.
Piastri suffered an off-kilter weekend at Austin’s Circuit of the Americas as he felt uncomfortable with his car’s behaviour throughout the weekend. His cause wasn’t helped by being eliminated at the start of Saturday’s sprint race, which robbed the Australian of a valuable 19-lap stint to learn from.
It’s not Piastri’s first wobble since the summer break, having experienced a disastrous Baku weekend punctuated by two crashes. Coupled with Red Bull’s resurgence, the points McLaren has dropped have allowed Max Verstappen to enter the title fight, now just 40 points behind Piastri and 26 off Lando Norris who sits in second.
But McLaren boss Andrea Stella is convinced there is no structural issue Piastri is having to overcome to keep his title challenge on the rails.
“I think it’s two-fold. Clearly when we look at the last four races – drivers, team – there’s more that we could have done,” Stella said. “There’s more that we could have extracted. And this is not only Oscar. This is Lando, this is Andrea, this is the entire team. We could have done a little bit better.
“At the same time, circuits like Austin are pretty unique circuits where you have very low grip and the tyres don’t grain, and you can wear the tyres and they still work.
Oscar Piastri, McLaren
Photo by: Steven Tee / LAT Images via Getty Images
“And I think this is a regime in which Oscar… he’s relatively young as a Formula 1 driver. And certainly, his strength is that as soon as he spots something he can do better, he improves at the speed of light.”
Having digested the data from COTA, Stella thinks Piastri is now much better equipped next time he’s in a similar position, so the Italian isn’t worried about a repeat.
“The conditions of Austin are something that he understood that he could have driven in a slightly different way,” he added. “He got it. The next time we have the same situation, he will do it.
“It’s part of the development of a driver, which is the reason why actually, despite being so young, he is leading the championship. He understands, he processes, he learns.”
Piastri also had a low-key Friday in Mexico, however, ending the day just 12th on the timesheets and also appearing a step behind Norris on long-run pace.
Over one lap Piastri mainly seemed to struggle with braking into Turns 1 and 4 compared to Norris, but he wasn’t too alarmed by his modest start.
Oscar Piastri, McLaren
Photo by: Zak Mauger / LAT Images via Getty Images
“It was okay,” he said. “The lap on softs at low fuel was pretty average, so I’m not surprised with the lap time but I tried a lot of things.
“We’ll go through and have a look at what worked what didn’t, but overall I felt reasonable. Let’s see what we can tune up for tomorrow. Trying to make things just a bit more consistent is the biggest thing.”
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– The Autosport.com Team
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