Piastri not able to drive ‘through pure instinct’ and that is costing him – Stella

The Dutch Grand Prix weekend marked one year since Oscar Piastri last won a race for McLaren, his championship fight tailing away towards the end of 2025 before this season has thrown up a new set of challenges for the Australian.

He finished sixth in Zandvoort, a race won by team mate Lando Norris who now has two Grand Prix victories and one Sprint win this season, while Piastri has totalled just the two podiums.

There seems a clear difference between how the two McLaren drivers are able to extract performance from the MCL40, especially on the harder tyre compounds. Piastri has shown glimpses of the form that nearly took him to the title last year, but his pace often tails away in the latter stages.

In Zandvoort, Piastri was running third on the hard tyres, after pulling off a brilliant opportunistic racer’s move on George Russell. But once he pitted for a second set of hards, his pace faded and he wound up a distant sixth behind both Ferrari cars.

“I think last year we had seen already with Oscar that from a technical driving point of view, when the car has this low level of grip like we saw last year for instance in Mexico or in Austin, he needs to adapt the way he drives, the way he thinks, the driving, his expectations,” explained team boss Andrea Stella.

“And this requires a bit of mental effort, which gets him to lose a couple of tenths of a second, because you sort of have to process rather than drive through pure instinct because what happens is what you expect.

“So, I think it's one of those cases in which you have to adapt your natural driving style to the demand of the car. So, it stays in the space of driving and in the space of the technical side of things.

“I don't think it has anything to do with any psychological kind of opportunity. This is purely technical. I think this weekend, actually, we saw Oscar expressing competitive lap times.”

The 2026 generation of cars are markedly different to last year’s, and Piastri was not helped by two DNS results to start the year. With the drivers all needing to learn how best to use their deployment and handle the tyres, losing two full Grands Prix worth of data does seem to have hampered the Australian.

But Stella was also keen to point out that not everything that happened to Piastri in the Dutch Grand Prix was due to his driving. Having made it past Russell with that overtake, Piastri was initially able to drop the Mercedes – but found himself back behind Russell thanks to a slow pit stop.

“I think in the race there were two factors that affected Oscar. One was the fact, and this is a team responsibility, that when we pitted to cover Russell, actually we lost the position to Russell because of a slow pit stop. And this is up to the team, not up to Oscar,” Stella continued.

“And then this second stint on hard tyres, we were not able to switch these tyres on. They stayed permanently in a regime of very, very low grip, which we didn't see in the first stint. So, there's a couple of things that we need to work on.

“But I would also add to this that we are in a phase of Formula 1 in which we have at least three teams that are within one tenth of a second. And as soon as things are not optimised, then you may have a very significant positional loss.

“If you're not optimised, now you are P6. It's very brutal from this point of view, so I think we just have to keep working with Oscar on all the opportunities and I'm happy with the improvements that I've seen during this weekend, and I am sure that there will be even more for the rest of the season.”