How Barcelona GP ‘difficulties’ triggered Oscar Piastri’s McLaren turnaround

Oscar Piastri has revealed that he’s been forced out of his comfort zone as he comes to terms with the current generation of F1 cars.

After leading last year’s championship at the summer break with six wins to his name, the Australian has found it tougher going with McLaren in the first half of F1 2026.

Oscar Piastri highlights Barcelona GP as turning point

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A torrid start to the campaign saw Piastri crash out on the reconnaissance lap even before the Australian GP began, before reliability issues then saw him fail to start the Chinese GP.

He got his first racing laps of the year in Japan, where he finished second and was unlucky with the timing of a Safety Car not to have left Suzuka with more.

It remains Piastri’s best result of the season, with third place in Miami the only other time he’s featured on the podium.

“I think our kind of general level of performance has not been quite where we want it to be, obviously,” Piastri said in an interview with McLaren’s official website.

“We’ve come close to some victories and had a few podiums, which has been good, but we obviously set the bar pretty high last year.

“We’ve also had a fair share of issues, whether it be difficult races or reliability issues. So definitely up and down.”

Technical challenges aside, new regulations for F1 2026 have forced drivers to adopt unique techniques behind the wheel in order to optimise the use of the electrical energy available to them over a lap.

That includes sacrificing peak corner speeds to instead release the power unit’s full potential on a straight.

While much of that can be predicted by engineers, there have been lessons for the drivers, too.

“We’re having to find so many new things and new ways of extracting performance out of the car and ourselves,” Piastri explained.

“It’s quite easy to just settle into your normal rhythm and do the things you’ve always done, but that doesn’t always work in these cars – I think Barcelona was definitely an example of that.

“In Austria I felt like I really had to stretch myself a bit more and try some new things, and just go about driving in a slightly different way.”

The Barcelona GP was a tough one. Though he finished fifth, he was almost a minute off the race lead and 35-seconds down on teammate Lando Norris.

However, a week later in Austria, Piastri was fourth and ahead of his teammate on a circuit at which Norris has traditionally performed well.

“Austria was a good one,” Piastri reflected.

“The result was reasonable, with the P4, but also in terms of the turnaround from Barcelona and just how I felt the weekend went.

“Barcelona was definitely one of the more difficult weekends of the year, and I had to learn a lot from that one and improve quite a lot, and I feel like Austria was really good: to bounce back and put some of that learning into place.

“I think the good results have been one thing, but I feel like I’ve also learned a lot about how I can improve myself as a driver, even if the results don’t always show it.”

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A key component of that has been getting on top of the latest generation of cars, with Piastri feeling he made strides heading into the summer break.

“Every car is going to need slightly different things on how to go fast, and I feel like in the last few races before the break, I’ve definitely discovered more and more about how the car needs to be driven, how it works, how to go quickly in it, which is not always the most obvious or natural thing,” he said.

“I think we have made a lot of progress since the beginning of the season with these cars,” Piastri added.

“Whether that be us as drivers getting used to them, or through the work that has been done across drivers, teams, the FIA and F1 to tweak and improve them as we’ve gone through the year.

“However, looking back at the halfway point, we still have work to do.

“While we can’t just make the regulations and the racing exactly how we want it as drivers – as that may make it quite boring for everyone else – there are still tweaks we can make to improve from where we are now.

“I am looking forward to seeing what we can do with the second part of the season and into next year.”

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