Why Piastri has struggled to show his best with this year's McLaren MCL40

A year ago, Oscar Piastri was leading the Formula 1 standings by 14 points over Lando Norris. Then, the United States Grand Prix had just reached its conclusion, Piastri having finished fifth and three positions down on Norris a day after propagating their double-retirement from the sprint race. 

Infamously, Piastri had punted Norris into a spin at Turn 1 during the sprint race, after finding Nico Hulkenberg on his left when attempting to make a switchback pass. The Australian tagged Hulkenberg, then tagged Norris, and both McLarens ended the Saturday race with nothing but extensive damage; remember that Norris was under 'sanction' at the team when he'd tapped Piastri in Singapore, understood to be preference given to Piastri regarding their run orders in qualifying (essentially, Piastri could choose whether he went on track first or second). That sanction effectively lasted through sprint qualifying, and then was abandoned after the Turn 1 contact. 

This was the most recent point that Piastri held the title lead, since Norris subsequently claimed it in Mexico when Piastri struggled through a similarly pallid weekend at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez. McLaren theorised at the time that, as the F1 circus moved to lower-traction surfaces in those two North American rounds, the lack of grip was hurting Piastri more than it had Norris.

Ultimately, that theory has also permeated into 2026, as Piastri has been so far unable to hit the heights that Norris has managed to uncover across the season. Even at Hungary, a race that Piastri led having pounced on Norris at the second corner of the opening lap, the Briton was being stifled by his own team-mate's lesser pace through the first half of the race. 

Part of this deficit can be explained by this year's McLaren chassis. When reflecting on his Singapore evening, Norris spoke about the difficulties of this year's MCL40 and the way that its drivers are often on "a knife-edge" and forced to hustle the car on every single lap to get performance out of it. It is, in many respects, recalcitrant; it demands that the drivers are continually sparring with the steering wheel and pre-empting the car's reaction to kerbs and corners. 

For Norris, it's not something he feels happy about doing - but he does possess the ability to deal with it. As a driver who relies much more on the wheel feedback, rather than Piastri's seat-of-the-pants feeling, he's able to contend with a car just as long as it provides enough cuing through his hands. This was a problem with last year's McLaren, and Norris later got a suspension package designed to issue more self-aligning torque at the front end so he could feel the car more easily.

Both Piastri and Norris have found the MCL40 a tough beast to tame

Photo by: Joe Portlock / Getty Images

Piastri 'feels' the car more conventionally, and would dearly love to press his more 'neutral' style into action with a more responsive, intuitive car. Forcing the car into complying with his demands isn't natural for the Melbourne native, as team principal Andrea Stella explains.

“The fact that the car needs quite a lot of effort to deliver lap time, and it requires a level of intensity in the driving input which is much [greater] to last year, this is something that took some time for the drivers to understand,” Stella explained after Singapore, when asked by Autosport if he agreed with Norris' comments on driving inputs.

“And it's also one of the reasons why Oscar, at some stage, he almost lost some of the competitiveness compared to Lando. And we were here discussing, what is happening with Oscar? And I've always said that that was a technical matter. Oscar just needed to understand how to force the car to do some things and sort of abandon the fact that driving fast will not necessarily mean driving clean, if that makes sense, which was the signature of Oscar when we have seen him fast in the past. 

His form through the first two-thirds of 2025 demonstrated just how potent Piastri can be when he's got a car that he likes

“He was clean, he had really good data to see he was very repeatable and he was fast. With this car, all these things together they don't seem to happen very often so it's a lot of work for the drivers.”

Piastri is improving on that front, however, while McLaren is aiming to make its 2027 car a touch more driver-friendly. Qualifying third in Baku demonstrated that Piastri can corral the MCL40 into doing his bidding, and there have been other such flashes of this through the year - Suzuka being one early-season example, and his recovery in Singapore after a puncture offering another recent demonstration. It's been patchy so far, sure, but there has been an upward trend in Piastri's performances.

Of course, his form through the first two-thirds of 2025 demonstrated just how potent Piastri can be when he's got a car that he likes. As mentioned, he was able to tap into the feedback from the chassis far more than Norris had been over the opening stages of the year, hence McLaren's front-end change on Norris' car. 

Piastri was in his element at circuits like Barcelona last year

Photo by: David Ramos / Getty Images

Piastri was offered the same suspension change, effectively a set-up tweak to the kingpin inclination, but he was happy with the MCL39 - particularly on circuits where high-speed cornering performance was vital. When it came to the driving inputs with the car, it rewarded being hands-off on corner entry and aggressive on the exit, which Piastri was very good at doing. At high-speed, this meant that Piastri could roll the car into the corner knowing that he could keep the throttle pinned, and he felt very comfortable knowing that the car was not going to break traction.

When Norris got the front-end change last year, it was clear that the eventual champion now had more confidence in the short-radius corners; Piastri was still generally happy in that scenario and in pursuing the slow-in-fast-out approach to the letter, but Norris then had a set-up where he could start to attack the corner entry kerbs more. On lower-grip tracks, Norris could afford to be more aggressive, while Piastri struggled to get the car to play with his marginally more passive style.

This year, the car seems to have swung in the other way; again, Norris is able to cope with it, but with the car needing constant attention through the cornering phases, and Piastri is having to learn to be comfortable with hanging the car out a bit more to maintain the turn-in. 

Some of an older-school mentality might suggest that the drivers should simply get on with the task at hand, and that drivers should simply adapt to what they're given, but it's also undeniable that a driver is generally quicker with a car that they're comfortable with. If less of their mental acuity is spent simply trying to keep the car moving through the corner, then they're in a position where they're not scrubbing tyres quite so much, and they're free to 'maximise' the corner exit and plan ahead for the next one. 

Across the balance of 2026, the drivers' need to fight the McLaren has been less of a hindrance in qualifying - since you're at the limit anyway, and used to brushing up against the absolute limit of grip. Across a race distance, however, it's more of a struggle as the driver has nowhere to hide for 50-odd laps and it makes it much more difficult to manage their race across a stint. 

If next year's MCL41 can slot somewhere between its two immediate forebears in terms of handling characteristics, the Woking squad should luxuriate in having two very happy drivers. That's the aim, of course, but you can't just 'decide' how a car will handle; you only really find those characteristics out in pre-season testing...

Hard work: Piastri has had to get comfortable with hustling his 2026 McLaren

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