Oscar Piastri confirms McLaren findings after United States GP investigation
Can Oscar Piastri handle the pressure and secure a first F1 title?
Oscar Piastri has confirmed that McLaren found “nothing drastically wrong” with his car following an investigation into the cause of his disappointing United States Grand Prix performance.
And the F1 2025 championship leader believes his struggles were related to the demands of the Circuit of the Americas, with Piastri not expecting a repeat in Mexico this weekend.
Oscar Piastri admits ‘nothing drastically wrong’ with McLaren MCL39 at United States GP
Piastri’s late-season wobble continued in Austin, Texas, last weekend as he lacked the pace of teammate Lando Norris.
The Australian was consistently around three-tenths slower than his teammate, with the pair retiring from the sprint race after a collision at the first corner.
Piastri holds a 14-point lead over Norris entering this weekend’s Mexico City Grand Prix with Max Verstappen, the Red Bull driver and reigning four-time world champion, just 40 points behind after winning three of the last four rounds.
Andrea Stella, the McLaren team principal, revealed after the race in Austin that the team was carrying out a thorough check of Piastri’s car in an attempt to get to the bottom of his lack of pace.
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Appearing in Thursday’s FIA press conference in Mexico, Piastri revealed that McLaren found no major problems with his car.
Asked if he has considered requesting a change of chassis, he told PlanetF1.com and other media outlets: “I haven’t asked them to change anything.
“I think there were some things that were maybe not as good as they could have been [in Austin], but nothing drastically wrong with the car.
“There was a few things in terms of how the weekend played out and how the race panned out that were different to our expectations from a few different angles.
“If you could do the weekend again, we’d probably do a few things a little bit differently, but we wouldn’t be changing anything major.
“I think it’s very CoTA-specific. It was just a messy weekend with everything that went on as well, so there’s an element of that hampering things.
“But I think the analysis we’ve done has highlighted that there were a lot of things that were specific to Austin, so I’m not really concerned that those problems will still persist.
“Obviously, I’m hoping that this weekend will be a bit better.”
The leading theory behind Piastri’s poor pace in Austin is that he ended up driving too conservatively, largely due to the unusual demands of the circuit.
With the tyres regularly overheating 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, drivers were required to take a counter-intuitive approach.
Rather than backing off to preserve their tyres, they were instead encouraged to approach the lap as normal and cope with snappy moments from the car in the low-grip conditions.
Piastri is thought to have been driving excessively cautiously relative to his rivals in an effort to protect his rubber even though the tyres were bound to overheat regardless, contributing to his inflated deficit to the frontrunners.
More on Oscar Piastri and McLaren from PlanetF1.com
Stella alluded to the theory that Piastri’s driving contributed to his own downfall in Texas, suggesting that his underwhelming performance represented an opportunity to improve on one of his weaknesses.
Asked to identify the reason behind Piastri’s lacklustre performance, Stella said: “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 set-up of the car, the set-up of the floor, that everything is as intended from a car point of view.
“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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