Oscar Piastri reveals ‘biggest area for lap time’ in search for gains

Oscar Piastri has said optimising power unit deployment remains the single largest performance differentiator over a lap this season.

McLaren admitted the need to take time to get to grips with its customer Mercedes power earlier in the year, with the team now working with the High Performance Powertrains division looking to maximise its potential.

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McLaren team principal Andrea Stella was open in acknowledging at the start of the season that his team needed to learn to make the most of the new Mercedes power unit, with the main pitfall of a customer engine coming from a lack of knowledge compared to the factory team.

The reigning Constructors’ champions currently sit third in the standings, albeit 154 points behind Mercedes in the lead as we near the halfway point of the season.

Piastri denied that circumstances around power unit deployment change too much for the requirements of a Sprint weekend, with a significant amount of work placed into optimising each weekend before it starts.

“The only thing that would change things massively is physics or different engines, which we’re not going to get, obviously,” Piastri told PlanetF1.com and others at Silverstone.

“We do so much preparation with these engines – we’re certainly not just rocking up on the track and seeing what happens.

“We do hundreds of laps in the simulator with us [Piastri and Lando Norris], test drivers, offline simulations, because at the moment power units are the biggest area for lap time still.

“We have a pretty good idea of what we think will be optimal, or at least what’s very close to it, but you can’t magically generate energy out of thin air, which is what we all want to do.”

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Last weekend’s British Grand Prix at Silverstone and the upcoming Belgian Grand Prix are both hosted at so-called ‘energy-starved’ circuits, where recharging opportunities are at an overall deficit compared to power output.

Piastri pointed out the differences that can lead to in straight-line speed, and that despite the label of ‘yo-yo’ or ‘Mario Kart’ racing having taken place earlier in the season, judging overtakes in those circumstances are not as easy as they appear.

“At some tracks there’s been quite a good [energy] balance,” he explained. “In Austria, for example, was actually a pretty good balance.

“I think the risk on all these energy-starved circuits is you end up with crazy situations where someone’s half a second faster in one straight, half a second slower in the next, and at certain points it’s dangerous.

“You’ve got cars with 30 or 40 kilometres an hour differences in a straight line, and the drivers can’t do anything about it, because either the deployment’s deploying when we wouldn’t necessarily choose to, or out of battery, and we can’t deploy anything we want to.

“It’s entertaining. I think on TV it looks much, much more simple than it is behind the wheel, so I won’t say any more, but at some tracks, there’s a decent balance, at other tracks it’s silly, or they’re all references to a certain video game, so I don’t need to say that.”

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

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