McLaren offer fascinating technical insight into ongoing Oscar Piastri woes

McLaren boss Andrea Stella believes Oscar Piastri's ongoing struggles in F1 are not "psychological" and are a "purely technical" problem for the Australian.

Following his sixth-place finish at Zandvoort last weekend, Piastri will go a full calendar year without earning a victory in a grand prix, with his last being at the 2025 Dutch GP on August 31st, although he did win the Qatar Sprint towards the end of last season. 

Piastri has thus far failed to relive the heights of 2025, where he led the championship table for 15 of the 24 races, before falling away towards the end of the season to finish third, with his fate being sealed during a tough run of races across the United States-Mexico City-Sao Paulo triple-header, where he took a hat-trick of fifth-place finishes.

Throughout those races, Piastri struggled in the low-grip conditions of those circuits, a trait which is at the root of his struggles in 2026, where he is seventh in the standings after 12 races with 104 points, and a best finish of second in Japan. 

For 2026, the cars themselves have had the downforce slashed away, with it also being created in a different style to the ground-effect machines Piastri drove from his 2023 debut to the end of the 2025 campaign, with the new breed of car less stable at the rear and sliding around more. 

This constant state of micro-corrections on the steering wheel is at odds with Piastri's smooth, fluent driving style, which worked so well with the well-honed ground effect machines, with the fourth-year driver thus far struggling to adapt accordingly

Discussing the ongoing struggles of the nine-time grand prix winner, his McLaren team principal, Stella, has dismissed the idea that it is a psychological issue Piastri is encountering, and offered a breakdown of the "purely technical" roadblock he is facing. 

"I think last year we had seen already with Oscar that, from a technical driving point of view, when the car has this low level of grip, like we saw last year, for instance in Mexico or in Austin, he needs to adapt the way he drives, the the way he thinks, the driving, his expectations, and this requires a bit of, I would say, a bit of mental effort, which gets him to lose a couple of tenths of a second," Stella told media, including RacingNews365.

"Because you have to process rather than drive through pure instinct, because what happens is what you expect, so I think it's one of those cases in which you have to adapt your natural driving style to the demand of the car. 

"It stays in the space of driving and in the space of the technical side of things. I don't think it's anything to do with any psychological [aspect]. This is purely technical. 

"[Over the Dutch GP weekend], we actually saw Oscar expressing competitive lap times, and I think in the race there were two factors that affected Oscar. 

"One was the fact, and this is a team responsibility, that when we pitted to cover Russell, actually we lost the position to Russell because of a slow pit-stop, and this is up to the team, not up to Oscar, and then his second stint on hard tyres, we were not able to switch those tyres on. They stayed permanently in a regime of very, very low grip, which we didn't see in the first stint, so there are a couple of things that we need to work on.

"But I would also add to this that we are in a phase of Formula 1 in which we have at least three teams that are within one-tenth of a second, and as soon as things are not optimised, then you may have a very significant positional loss, so if you're not optimised now, you are P6. 

"It's very brutal from this point of view, so I think we just have to keep working with Oscar on all the opportunities, and I'm happy with the improvements that I've seen during this weekend, and I'm sure that there will be even more for the rest of the season."