Oscar Piastri appears stuck in a relative rut when it comes to his current performance level with McLaren, and team boss Andrea Stella believes the main issue is that the Australian still not fully speaking the MCL40’s language.
With the nine-time Grand Prix winner struggling to reproduce the form that kept him so closely matched with Norris through much of 2025, McLaren has identified a surprisingly fundamental obstacle: its driver is still having to think his way through the new-generation car rather than simply feeling it.
But Stella insists that is something the team can address – and that there is now a “clear agenda” aimed at bringing Piastri back into harmony with his machinery.
The 25-year-old’s difficulties have become increasingly apparent under the 2026 regulations. Reduced aerodynamic grip, narrower tyres and the very different demands of the new power units have altered the characteristics of the cars, taking away some of the high-speed, high-grip strengths that previously suited Piastri particularly well.
Norris, meanwhile, has adapted more effectively, leaving Piastri playing catch-up in a season when McLaren had expected both drivers to be fighting at the front.
“I think with Oscar we need to qualify better, stay closer to the podium finish positions from the start,” Stella explained.
“In Monza he was P3 at the end of qualifying but somehow we managed to start P6 for the impeding. So there are several circumstances of which we need to take more control.”
McLaren wants Piastri to stop thinking
The more revealing part of Stella’s assessment, however, concerns what is happening inside the cockpit.
Rather than suggesting Piastri simply needs to extract more from himself, Stella believes the team needs to make the MCL40 more intuitive for him. At present, too much conscious thought appears to be creeping into his driving – and in Formula 1, those fractions of hesitation can quickly become lap time.
“We need to execute better and then at the same time we need to get more in tune between Oscar and the MCL40 because still Oscar is driving and thinking,” Stella said.
“And when you drive and think, things get slowed down; slower as a driver in terms of deciding what to do and ultimately you are slower in terms of lap times.”
©McLaren
It is a blunt diagnosis, but Stella sees it as a fixable one.
The McLaren boss is confident that once Piastri becomes more instinctive with the MCL40, his underlying ability will begin to show itself again.
“So I think the agenda is very clear as to what we have to improve and I expect, like I always say, that we will get on top of that and we will see a stronger Oscar in the final part [of the year],” he added.
A compromised race only deepened the deficit
Piastri's struggles in Madrid were not entirely of his own making.
After qualifying third, an impeding penalty dropped him to sixth on the grid, immediately putting him on the back foot. Then his race took another hit at the opening corner when he encountered George Russell’s Mercedes and damaged his front wing.
“The front wing damage cost Oscar a few units of aero balance,” Stella added. “So definitely very measurable.”
McLaren feared the loss of front-end downforce could also wreak havoc with Piastri’s front tyres, potentially forcing an additional pit stop. Fortunately, the hard compound proved robust enough to avoid the graining the team had feared.
“We were actually quite worried that this would have caused a lot of graining because the front end lost a lot of downforce,” the McLaren chief explained.
“As a matter of fact, and thankfully, the hard tyres were hard and resistant enough not to open up the graining so Oscar could stay in the race.”
Piastri did manage to make a move on Arvid Lindblad after his pit stop, but his recovery stalled behind Franco Colapinto’s Alpine, leaving him seventh at the chequered flag.
Stella nevertheless believes the circumstances made a difficult afternoon even harder to salvage.
“When it comes to Oscar, I think the race was definitely compromised by not only the damage on the car but having lost further positions at the start,” he said.
“So I think even without the damage, it would have been a difficult race to get more out of the situation in which he found himself.”
For McLaren, then, the task is becoming increasingly clear: eliminate the operational mistakes, give Piastri a cleaner platform, and – most importantly – make the MCL40 feel natural enough that he no longer has to think about driving it.
That, Stella believes, could unlock a very different Piastri in the season’s closing stages.
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