Oscar Piastri casts admission over Russell battle in US GP

Oscar Piastri expressed surprise that he was able to keep George Russell at bay in the United States GP, admitting that it provided a rare positive from a challenging weekend.

Piastri finished where he started in Austin, in seventh, gaining a position on Russell but ceding a spot to McLaren teammate Lando Norris, who crossed the line in fifth.

Oscar Piastri holds off Russell in Austin

The Australian ran as the leading McLaren in the opening stages, but he was ordered to let Norris through seven laps in, amid the Briton’s admission that he was being held up.

Piastri recouped a place, however, when Russell was made to serve a five-second time penalty that he copped for leaving the track and gaining an advantage on the first lap.

And while Russell piled on the pressure, Piastri managed to repel his rival’s advances until the chequered flag, a development which came as a shock to the McLaren driver, given that the Mercedes proved to boast race-winning pace in Kimi Antonelli’s hands.

“I was a bit surprised that I could keep him behind, to be honest,” Piastri told PlanetF1.com and other accredited media.

“But no, I mean glad that I could, but obviously, [I] don’t think either of us really want to be battling for seventh.

“So yeah, just a tricky weekend, but at least that was a bit of a positive.”

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Piastri has revealed that the deployment issues that Isack Hadjar encountered on his Red Bull as he exited the pits almost inadvertently cost him in his battle with Russell.

“I think when Hadjar came out of the pits, he looked like he had some kind of issue, and his deployment was a bit all over the place,” Piastri recounted. “So I was kind of catching him in awkward places and lost a fair bit of time there.

“And then I was kind of defending from George for the rest of the race from that.”

However, Piastri, who ended up 22 seconds behind Norris in the sister McLaren, has acknowledged that his lap times, even in clear air, weren’t as competitive as he hoped.

“But I think on top of that, pace just clearly wasn’t very good,” he continued. “So plenty to try and understand.”

Following Norris’ claim that McLaren’s 2026 challenger is among the “hardest cars I’ve ever had to drive”, Piastri, still winless this season, believes his race epitomised the difficulty both drivers have had in extracting consistent speed from the MCL40.

“It seemed like a bit of a struggle in various different places, and I could kind of fix one place and not another, and it was just a bit of a struggle, to be honest,” he said.

“So I think it kind of just points to how tricky it is to get performance out of the car. I could achieve something decent one lap, but then trying to repeat it was very, very tough.

“So that’s been the story of the weekend, and in some ways the story of the year.”

Read more: Winners and losers from the 2026 United States Grand Prix