Oscar Piastri F1 struggles explained - and why the clues were there in 2025

Most of the focus in late 2025 on Oscar Piastri was his apparent 'crumbling' in the world championship fight as he faded away. 

The Australian endured a dip in form from his Azerbaijan GP disaster to his disqualification in Las Vegas, a run of six races taking in the Baku, Singapore, United States, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and Sin City rounds. Piastri scored a fourth, three fifths, and had two non-scores. He also was the trigger of the double McLaren DNF at the start of the Austin Sprint.

This coincided with Lando Norris hitting top form with dominant wins in Mexico and Brazil, and the Max Verstappen momentum train gaining ever more speed. In the end, after leading for 15 of the 24 rounds, Piastri finished third in the standings, 13 points behind Norris and 11 behind Verstappen, having held a 34- and 104-point advantage, respectively, after the Dutch GP. 

That win at Zandvoort was almost one calendar year ago for Piastri, who finds himself seventh with 92 points to his name during the 2026 summer break, five places and 192 points worse off than he was 12 months ago, albeit with three fewer races this time around. 

Piastri has struggled in 2026, and has not scored a podium since third in Miami, eight races ago, only out-qualifying Norris once since that weekend (in Monaco), with a gap of 0.477s between the pair last time out in Hungary. 

Whilst Norris has hit top form, Piastri's struggles are down to the very nature of the cars themselves, and the huge chassis changes from 2025, a trend first seen in those late North American races last season when the title truly slipped from his grasp. 

The psychological effect of losing the 2025 title in the manner he did will certainly be hanging over Piastri, but it is far from the main reason why he is struggling. 

Where and why Piastri is struggling

Piastri is renowned as a smooth and precise driver, in the mould of four-time champion Alain Prost. 

This style is perfect for the uber-high levels of downforce enjoyed by the drivers with the 2025 cars. With the floor of the car generating most of the downforce, the car is there for the driver to lean on through the high-speed corners - where Piastri has always excelled - with the smooth style paying off in the slow-speed corners, where drivers spend more time. 

But in a car which is nervous and twitchy, with the rear constantly moving around underneath the driver, these constant micro-corrections on the steering wheel to keep it pointing straight and forwards, and not inducing yaw, can highlight the limitations. 

In the United States, Mexico City, and Sao Paulo races last autumn, Piastri was comprehensively outperformed by Norris, as he laboured to his three successive fifth places whilst Norris scored a second and two wins. In qualifying, Norris pulled out an average lead of 0.415s and a grid position of 1.3 to Piastri's 5.6. 

Austin, the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, and Interlagos are all known as low-grip circuits - or those where the car is nervous and twitchy, with the rear constantly moving around underneath the driver, leading to constant micro-corrections on the steering wheel. 

By their very nature, the cars in 2026 are low-grip. They have been slashed of downforce, with the way they generate it completely overhauled, with the new generation of machine returning to a 2021-type philosophy of wings generating most of the downforce and the aerodynamic rake - the difference in height between the front and rear of the car - returning after the flat-bottomed floors of ground effects. The floor, of course, is still important in generating load, but not to the extent it once was.

Piastri's style in being uber-smooth and precise, or in the words of Andrea Stella, "too clean" is not being rewarded by this generation of car. Essentially, these cars need to be hustled around a lap, dealing with the slides and snaps, which simply were not present in 2025 owing to the higher downforce levels. 

But that's not the only issue facing Piastri, another is simply that he's only driven for McLaren. 

The McLaren muscle memory

Joining in 2023, Piastri has only ever driven a ground effect McLaren prior to 2026. It is all the muscle memory he has of an F1 car being driven in anger. It is predictable, and in those early years of a driver learning and developing their style, for Piastri, for whom tyre management remains a slight weakness, crucial. 

But his blueprints and knowledge of how to drive an F1 car have been ripped up, and he is effectively learning on the job how he must adapt his style to extract performance from the MCL40 equipment he has been given this season. 

In contrast, across the garage, Norris has experience of driving a pre-ground-effect McLaren, from 2019 to 2021 during his own formative years. In terms of experience, Piastri on 79 grand prix starts, is where Norris was at the 2022 United States GP, when the Briton was still firmly rough around the edges despite showing blinding flashes of his potential. 

It is not an excuse for Piastri. Drivers constantly move around from team to team and have to adapt to the idiosyncrasies of each team's design - something which wrecked Lewis Hamilton's first Ferrari campaign and turned his dream move into an annus horribilis. 

There have been flashes of Piastri's potential in 2026, with his performance in Japan, his best of the season, as he took second, and could have beaten Kimi Antonelli without the fortunately timed safety car for the Mercedes. 

It's his job now to quickly get onto Norris's level in terms of understanding and bring himself back into the fight now that the MCL40 is a grand prix winning and pole position-contending machine, and not cut adrift in his own no-man's-land he was slipped into at times in the first 11 races of 2026.