Oscar Piastri unlocks McLaren discovery after 'fundamental' F1 change

Oscar Piastri believes he has found a potential breakthrough in how 2026-spec F1 cars must be driven after a tricky first-half of the season.

The Australian enters the summer break on just 92 points and has not taken a podium finish since the Miami GP, and just two overall. 

Whilst the MCL40 machine has lacked the competitiveness of rival teams, Piastri's own performances have been second-best to Lando Norris, with the Briton qualifying ahead seven times out of the last eight, with Piastri only ahead in Monaco, on the road, since Miami. 

This is in contrast to 2025 where Piastri claimed six wins in the first-half of the season to head into the break as the championship leader and seemingly at one with the ground-effects MCL39 machine.

Given the radical overhaul of the 2026 chassis and power units, drivers are having to re-learn their driving styles to best extract performance, something Piastri feels he has been slow on the up-take with. 

"We're having to find so many new things and new ways of extracting performance out of the car and ourselves," said Piastri. 

"It's quite easy to just settle into your normal rhythm and do the things you've always done, but that doesn’t always work in these cars; I think Barcelona was definitely an example of that. 

"In Austria I felt like I really had to stretch myself a bit more and try some new things, and just go about driving in a slightly different way. 

"Every car is going to need slightly different things on how to go fast, and I feel like in the last few races before the break, I've definitely discovered more and more about how the car needs to be driven, how it works, how to go quickly in it, which is not always the most obvious or natural thing.

"I think this rule set is just so different in so many ways. During the previous regulation changes, the cars themselves changed quite a bit, in terms of how much downforce they have or how they generate the downforce. 

"But this regulation change has been like a completely fundamental change to how you drive a race car, in some ways.

"It's been a huge reset for us, for me as well. I've had to tackle things in different ways and change the way I go about some things."