Oscar Piastri confirms McLaren has tweaked papaya rules ahead of 2026 season

Oscar Piastri says McLaren’s ‘papaya rules’ will evolve further this year, after some self-inflicted ‘headaches’ during 2025.

McLaren’s tight leash on how Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri race each other has been a major talking point over the last two seasons.

Oscar Piastri welcomes papaya rules evolution for 2026

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Piastri was McLaren’s top performer for the first half of the F1 2025 season, before Norris raised his game in the second half; the British driver putting in a stellar final third of the season to wrest the championship impetus away from the Australian.

While there were no particular flashpoints of acrimony between the two drivers despite their championship fight, a collision in Canada and contact in Singapore being the two events that came closest, this was largely down to McLaren’s ‘papaya rules’ and two driver personalities that acquiesced to those rules of engagement.

The papaya rules broadly outline the internal rules that both drivers must obey when racing each other, with the main criteria being ensuring a lack of contact between the pair.

Singapore was perhaps the most contentious of these moments, with Norris clashing with Piastri in an aggressive overtake on the first lap that saw the Australian take to the team radio to question the nature of the incident. McLaren opted against instructing Norris to cede position.

Another incident saw Piastri instructed to yield position to Norris at the Italian Grand Prix, after a slow pitstop resulted in Norris filtering out behind Piastri. Despite Piastri having benefitted from what was a normal racing pitfall, he was asked to give back the position to Norris, which he did.

The papaya rules resulted in quite a constrained title fight between the pair, with no outwardly expressive moment of emotion or anger as circumstances ebbed and flowed, and it led to observers and fans questioning whether the tight leash imposed on Norris and Piastri by McLaren was the right way to go about racing.

Speaking during a pre-season event at the McLaren Technology Centre, team boss Andrea Stella told select media, including PlanetF1.com, that there had been a full review of McLaren’s racing principles during the winter break.

“I can certainly say that, like anything that we approach at McLaren, we go through a thorough process of review, such that we can see where the opportunities are to improve,” he said.

“This was the same for what we call the racing principles and the way we go racing and internal competition. We got quite a lot of feedback already during the season last year, we had conversations after the season, and we are having conversations pretty much as we speak now.

“All these have led us to reaffirm, fundamentally, like I’ve said before, the concepts of fairness, integrity, equal opportunities, and sportsmanship.

“They are all fundamental for the team, for Lando, and for Oscar. So they are reaffirmed. They are confirmed and consolidated, if anything.

“At the same time, we all acknowledge that the volume of work required for the team and, to some extent, even for the drivers related to internal competition, was important.

“Therefore, any attempt we can make to make going racing together simpler, to some extent, will be welcome. It will be, in reality, a matter of fine-tuning, because once we reviewed what we have done in most of the cases, we said that’s exactly what we would still do again.

“But we have found a few opportunities in which we can streamline the way in which we operate collectively, like I said, reaffirming, though, the fundamental principles that we have adopted in the past.”

With Norris having come on top in the title fight, and Piastri still chasing that elusive maiden title as he enters his fourth year in the sport, the Australian welcomed the step to evolve further to ensure greater harmony and to attempt to clear up misunderstandings.

“It will look different,” he said.

“For me, streamlining is a wise decision to make, and we’ve probably caused some headaches for ourselves that we didn’t need last year.

“As a general principle and a general way of going racing, it does bring a lot of positives with it, and it’s just about how we refine that to keep it to just positives, basically.

“There is always a lot more made out of it than what actually happens, and there were a lot of hypothetical situations and a lot of people who think without knowing the complete inner workings. A lot of things appear very differently from how they actually are.

“Some tweaks, for sure, this year, but I think it’s pretty clear that we still want to go racing as a team as much as we can.”

The nature of the intra-team battle between Norris and Piastri led to some hypothesising that McLaren was favouring Norris in the quest for the Drivers’ Championship, with Piastri pouring cold water on conspiracy theories of favouritism within the squad.

This position hasn’t changed in the wake of defeat, with Piastri reiterating his belief that he got a fair shot.

“I’m expecting that to stay exactly the same,” he said.

“That’s definitely not to say that certain things could have been done better last year.

“I think that was probably clear for everyone watching, but I think for me, at no point were there any bad intentions, or any time I questioned the intentions of things.

“Things could have been done better. Situations could have been handled differently, but that is part of elite sport and part of Formula 1, you’re never going to get every decision right. You’re never going to make every single person happy.

“That’s part of the unique part and nature of Formula 1, given it’s a team sport with an individual prize at the end as well.

“I think I got a fair shot last year, and we’re working on how we can improve things and make sure that we try to become stronger.”

Oscar Piastri on the lessons learned in 2025

Regardless of papaya rules, Piastri’s own slump in performance after the Dutch Grand Prix proved a major catalyst in the points swing that saw his 34-point lead ebb away as both Norris and Max Verstappen overtook him in the final third of the season.

But, having become a proper championship contender in just his third season in Formula 1, having become a race winner for the first time in the summer of 2024, Piastri said he’s taken more positives than negatives away from 2025.

“A lot of the lessons, both positive and… well, I wouldn’t say negative lessons, but some of them weren’t nice lessons to learn and some were tougher to learn, but in terms of performance and the peaks I had last year, they were a nice confidence boost and statement for myself that, when I get things right and maximise my potential, I can be a very strong competitor,” he said.

“Some of the lessons in the back half of the year, especially, were very different in nature. A couple of things in Mexico and Austin from a technical point of view, and driving point of view, that I hadn’t been challenged on earlier in the season… that was probably one lesson to take forward from that.

“There was a pretty long string of races where it was pretty eventful for lots of different reasons. Taking the lessons out of that and how the team and I can manage those things better, that’s probably one of the most important lessons for me.

“I’ve done a lot of good work to learn from that, and I think the team has as well. We’ll make some tweaks, some changes to how we go about things from every aspect – the main one you’re probably thinking about is how we race each other and how we go racing, but even from a performance and tyre management standpoint, there were a lot of lessons in various areas.

“Just constantly evolving, not standing still, is one of the big lessons from last year.”

With Piastri’s maiden title, arguably, going up in smoke as a result of his lack of selfishness in the battle, as well as his slump in form, he explained that he’d welcomed the winter break as a chance to switch off and mentally reset.

“Obviously, last season wasn’t the final result I wanted,” he said.

“It was nice to go through the offseason and reflect on last year as a whole. I think it was pretty easy to get drawn into the ending.

“But I think when you take a step back and look at how good last year was compared to my first couple of years in F1, how strong the car was, as a team, and just some of my individual performances, I was really proud of.

“When you take a step back and look at those… some races at the end of the year were a little bit painful, but to then go back and look back on the races that were really proud moments, that was really nice to do over the break and then just spend a couple of weeks not thinking about race cars!

“Spending time with my family, going back to Australia, seeing my friends I haven’t seen for 12 months. So it was nice to do some other things outside of F1 as well.

“Going back home this Christmas was a bit different from previous summers, definitely a few more people knew who I was.

“I think, for me, just the support I had from just being in the fight… the amount of comments I got about the way I go about things was honestly nice to hear.

“I’m not here just to be known as a nice person or someone who goes about things in a way that people think is good; I’m here to try and become an F1 world champion, but I’m very proud of the way I’ve gone about things.

“There are a lot of lessons from last year. Yes, the ending was a bit painful, but I think you can treat that in one of two ways: either you can let it bring you down, or give you more confidence and motivation for the future.

“With such a different rule set as well, that’s been a very good avenue to channel any motivation over the off-season.”

While Piastri may have missed out on what proved to be his first proper championship challenge, the Australian only sees positive upward momentum and clear improvement from his first two years, a momentum he’s aiming to continue in ’26.

“I think last year for me, the step in performance was more about putting a lot of the learnings and tools from my first two years in F1 together much more often,” he said.

“I think if you looked at my rookie season in ’23, qualifying was probably better than a lot of my races, ’24 was kind of the opposite and, in ’25, I was able to be strong in both the majority of the time, I was able to be strong in both critical areas of the weekend.

“So from that side of things, trying to repeat that is obviously the aim, and I think I’ve proven to myself once I can do that. Now, it’s how about you apply that to different cars in very different regulations – that’s the biggest thing.

“I think we’ve got a good baseline or blueprint of how to make effective changes; it’s now just identifying what the critical changes are going to be for this year, which we got a first read on in Barcelona and will develop more in Bahrain.”

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