McLaren explains why Oscar Piastri has been struggling at F1 Brazil GP

Youthful F1 title contender still undergoing a “learning process”

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has explained the reasons why Oscar Piastri has struggled to match team-mate Lando Norris at Formula 1’s Brazilian Grand Prix.

Having lacked pace for the past few rounds, Piastri was outqualified by Norris in all qualifying segments – sprint and regular alike – at Interlagos, with his deficit ranging from 0.043s in Q2 to 0.390s in Q1; he was 0.247s down on average across the six phases.

In the sprint, the Australian crashed out of third place after touching a wet kerb on lap six, bringing his championship deficit on Norris to up to nine points.

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Stella insisted Piastri had been “very competitive, very fast” since the beginning of the weekend, feeling better with the car than he did in Texas and Mexico, but argued that the poor grip conditions induced by rain showers made life hard for the 24-year-old.

“Today, if anything, the conditions saw much less grip on track compared to yesterday,” the Italian said following qualifying.

“Some of the techniques required to drive the car fast, they resemble a bit the techniques that were required in Austin and Mexico, so like Oscar is sort of learning this technique, embedding this technique, but it may take a bit more time to fully exploit them in a natural way – especially when, in conditions like today, you have in addition the fact that at every corner you don't know exactly how much grip you're going to find because of the wind, and this caught up even Lando in the first attempt in Q3.”

Lando Norris, McLaren, Oscar Piastri, McLaren, Andrea Stella, McLaren

Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images

Piastri did admit to experimenting with his driving style in the Mexico race, and Stella believes the recent track conditions simply suit Norris better.

“I think for Lando in this regime of low grip it's just a little more natural to do the things that are normal for him to do and actually produce some lap time,” he added. “For some reasons in the last three events we have had just low-grip conditions. You just have to kind of get the car to do what you want while the car is sliding.

“For Oscar himself this is a little bit of a learning process, but we know that Oscar learns at the speed of light and I'm expecting that tomorrow we will have a very strong race by Oscar.”

Asked why Piastri’s low-grip problem hadn’t been tackled earlier, Stella replied: “Not only he's never encountered this sustained sequence of similar conditions, it's quite anomalous that you have the tyres and the grip behaving like we have had in the last three events – not day one here in Brazil, but certainly day two, where just there's not much grip, like you really need to get the car to slide and sort of manage your handling while the car is sliding. It's weird, weird conditions.

Oscar Piastri, McLaren

Photo by: Steven Tee / LAT Images via Getty Images

“At the same time, the sport is so competitive that the difference is in the last one percent. And even if we say, ‘oh Oscar has been here in Brazil’, but it's the third time he drives in Brazil, and every year the conditions are subtly different.”

Stella also pointed to Norris’ own struggles with his new car’s behaviour earlier in the season, when Piastri had the upper hand.

“If we think Lando, it took time for him to adapt to how the MCL39 was behaving,” he said. “We were talking even with you and some of your questions at the start of the season about the understanding what the front tyres were doing, where was the limit of the grip, understanding when the car was flicking to oversteer. It took quite a bit of time and quite a lot of work with Lando, and when Lando was having this lack of feeling with the car, it was him now on the back foot. It's so marginal.”

Norris will start the Brazilian GP from pole position, with Piastri fourth on the grid.