After losing the lead of the Formula 1 championship, Oscar Piastri said he has not been able to adapt to the way McLaren’s car has changed over the past few races.
Piastri’s teammate Lando Norris took a one-point lead with a dominant win at the Mexican Grand Prix.
Piastri, who had led the championship since April, has seen a 35-point lead whittled away recently after four straight races without a podium finish. The Australian said what was working before, in terms of how he was driving McLaren’s constructors’ title-winning car, is not doing the job anymore.
“It’s certainly been a learning experience for sure, I think,” Piastri said after Sunday’s race. “For some reason, the last couple of weekends has required a very different way of driving, and what’s worked well for me in the last 19 races has needed something very different the last couple of weekends, and trying to wrap my head around why has been a bit of a struggle.
“But ultimately today was about trying to experiment with some of those things, because I would agree, I think driving the way I’ve had to drive these last couple of weekends is not particularly natural for me, so it’s been about trying to exploit it as much as I can.”
Piastri referenced Norris’ dominant win, adding: “I think [I understood the car] a little bit better, but it wasn’t so much the pace of the car, because clearly the car was pretty quick this weekend.
“It was more just trying to unlock it, and I felt like I potentially made some steps in doing that today, but ultimately when you’re behind so many cars and trying to fight for so long, it’s difficult to measure that a little bit, so hopefully we’ll get a bit more indication from some of the data.”
Asked what he had to do to regain the championship lead at one of the next four races, Piastri replied simply: “Find some more pace and win some more races.”
Piastri’s drive was largely about damage limitations after qualifying seventh on Saturday.
He made a decisive move on George Russell at one point of the race, with a late-braking move into Turn 1.
“I mean, I had to go for it in the end,” he said. “I tried a couple of times to kind of bide my time through the first sequence of corners and try and get him into Turn 4, but yeah, it was like every time you tried that they put quicksand down, because you just had no grip, so very difficult to do that, and I just had to go for it, and in the end it wasn’t too difficult.”
