Piastri's Sunday problem is bigger than his Saturday one
Oscar Piastri outqualified Lando Norris in Austin but finished 22 seconds behind him on the same strategy, after McLaren had planned a possible swap.
Oscar Piastri outqualified Lando Norris in Austin, then finished 22 seconds behind him on the same strategy. That's the shape of his season at McLaren: close on a Saturday, a long way back on a Sunday.
The qualifying result needs a footnote. Piastri deserves credit for setting a faster legal lap, but he was 0.424s behind Norris's fastest Q3 lap, which was deleted for track limits.
The gap that matters comes on Sunday
Over a season of qualifying, the two are barely separated. Norris leads the head-to-head 16-8, but the average gap between them is 0.040s, which is nothing.
The races tell a different story. In Austin, Piastri was on average half a second a lap slower than Norris on the same strategy. It wasn't a one-off. He lost 35 seconds at Barcelona and 32 at Zandvoort, and admitted there were "too many [races] now that have been really a long way off".
He hasn't been on the podium since Miami in early May. Either side of the summer break, Norris would have won three of four races but for a poorly timed virtual safety car in Madrid, while Piastri didn't feature on the podium at all. Budapest was his best chance, until contact while lapping Carlos Sainz took it away.
"It's not been anywhere near as competitive as what I wanted it to be," Piastri said in Austin.
Why the 2026 car takes away his strength
Andrea Stella, McLaren's team boss, thinks he knows why. In Singapore he said this year's car "needs quite a lot of effort to deliver laptime and it requires a level of intensity in the driving input which is much superior to last year".
That clashes with how Piastri likes to work. "Oscar's superpower is to build," Stella said. "Once he creates references, he can really effectively build lap after lap. But here, every lap is different. So these are the conditions that challenge Oscar."
That's why Saturday hides the problem. One lap doesn't need a run of references. A race distance does.
There had been hope it was behind him. In Singapore, McLaren F1 CEO Zak Brown said he was "liking everything I see out of Oscar, he's feeling much more confident, on top of things". Austin went the other way.
Planning the swap was the right call
Piastri's deficit was clear enough by Saturday that McLaren factored a possible order swap into their pre-race meetings. Stella's reason: "we had seen during the weekend that Lando was a little bit faster than Oscar".
Some will call that favouritism. We see planning, and we'd have done the same. Preparing for the quicker car to come through is basic race management, and the team had the evidence in front of them all weekend.
That Sunday gap, half a second a lap, is the number Piastri and McLaren need to fix before Mexico.
