Oscar Piastri is experiencing new difficulties with the 2026 McLaren compared to team-mate Lando Norris, including a weekend that neutered what team boss Andrea Stella calls his ‘superpower’.
📌 The Core Development
In qualifying, Norris has had the upper hand as he leads Piastri 16-8, but the actual average gap between them has only been 0.040s.
The more stark gap has been in a good number of grands prix, including Austin. Piastri (green line) is on average half a second slower than Norris (orange line), through the race on the same strategy, and ends up 22 seconds behind. This follows other weekends with big deficits like Barcelona (35 seconds) and Zandvoort (32 seconds), where he admitted there were “too many [races] now that have been really a long way off”.
🔍 Background & Sector Context
Asked what the issue with his race pace was, Piastri replied: "It was slow. I don't have any more than that at the moment.
“When [Isack] Hadjar came out of the pits, it looked like he had some kind of issue and his deployment was a bit all over the place. So I was kind of catching him in awkward places and lost a fair bit of time there.
📊 Industry & Real-World Impact
“Then I was kind of defending from George [Russell] for the rest of the race from that. But I think on top of that the pace just clearly wasn't very good. So plenty to try and understand.”
Benchmark Telemetry & EV Fuel Savings
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🔮 Strategic Outlook & What Lies Ahead
It was a weekend-long struggle for Piastri, as while on paper he outqualified Norris - and Piastri does deserve some credit for setting a faster legal lap - he was actually 0.424s behind Norris’s fastest (track limits-deleted) Q3 lap.
Piastri’s pace deficit was so clear by Saturday that McLaren had factored in the potential need to swap the cars' order in their pre-race meetings, because - as per team boss Stella - "we had seen during the weekend that Lando was a little bit faster than Oscar”.
