McLaren holds thorough Oscar Piastri car checks ahead of Mexican Grand Prix
The pressure is rising on Oscar Piastri
Andrea Stella, the McLaren team principal, has revealed the team is checking that Oscar Piastri’s car was not hamstrung by an unidentified problem over the United States Grand Prix weekend.
And he believes Piastri’s lacklustre outing in Austin proved that he “has an opportunity to improve” his own driving ahead of this weekend’s Mexican Grand Prix.
McLaren ‘checking’ Oscar Piastri car after alarming United States GP performance
Piastri arrived in Austin, Texas, last weekend nursing a 22-point lead over McLaren teammate Lando Norris in the F1 2025 drivers’ standings.
However, a poor showing by the Australian driver meant his advantage over Norris has been reduced to 14 points with five races remaining, with Max Verstappen’s third victory in four races putting him 40 points behind Piastri.
Piastri and Norris made contact for the second weekend in succession on the opening lap of the sprint race at the Circuit of the Americas, resulting in the McLaren pair retiring.
Piastri, who consistently trailed Norris by around 0.3 seconds all weekend, went on to finish a distant fifth in the main race.
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Speaking after the race, Piastri described his Austin weekend as “the odd one out” compared to recent disappointing showings in Azerbaijan and Singapore.
It has been suggested that Piastri drove conservatively in Austin due to the unusual requirements of the circuit, where the tyres regularly overheat due to the stresses imposed in the esses, the long Turn 15-16-17-18 right hander and the traction zones out of slow corners.
This required a counter-intuitive approach from the drivers to approach the lap as normal and deal with wayward moments in the low-grip conditions.
Piastri is thought to have been driving cautiously relative to his rivals even though the tyre was bound to overheat regardless.
Stella admitted that identifying the cause of Piastri’s poor pace was a priority after the United States Grand Prix weekend, with McLaren holding a thorough check of his MCL39 to rule out a potential car issue.
He told PlanetF1.com and other media outlets: “This is certainly one of the most important points that we need to review, which is the fact that Oscar, in qualifying and in the race, seemed to have a couple of tenths that he was not able to fully realise and that possibly was available in the car.
“We are actually now checking that we are completely happy with the setup of the car, the setup of the floor, that everything is as intended from a car point of view.”
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Stella then alluded to Piastri’s own driving as a potential factor behind his poor weekend, adding: “And at the same time, we’ll be looking at the driving.
“I think we know with Oscar that when the conditions are such that we have low grip, you really need to challenge the car and lean on the understeer, oversteer, locking.
“This is an area of his driving that he has an opportunity to improve. And in Oscar’s standards, this needs to [and] will improve pretty fast.
“And I think today we got quite a lot of information that adds to the information we got yesterday [Saturday in Austin].
“I think already this [Sunday] morning, we had some conversations with Oscar as to what we can we can do.
“So I think this is just data to learn and Oscar will learn pretty soon.”
Additional reporting by Elizabeth Blackstock
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