“More lows than highs” is how Oscar Piastri summed up the first half of his season in the lead-up to the weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix.
One can only imagine how he might have looked back on the year to date in the immediate aftermath of the crash with Carlos Sainz in Budapest that put an end to his bid for a first victory of the season. Presumably it would have required some asterisks to publish.
The chance to head into the mid-season break on a high evaporated on lap 38 when Sainz, found by the stewards to have ignored warnings the net race leader was coming through to lap him, turned into the McLaren, punting him off the road.
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The Australian’s lead had been delicate. He clearly didn’t have Norris’s pace, but he seized first place on the opening lap. With overtaking extremely difficult at the Hungaroring, he had a shot at grinding out a gritty, defensive victory.
But the time lost to the Sainz collision cost him that lead and, with it, any shot of victory. That his gearbox failed later in the race only added insult to injury.
Another low to outweigh those highs, then — and with Norris romping to an unopposed victory, more questions about the balance of power inside McLaren just half a season on from the narrow title decider in Abu Dhabi that could have seen either driver crowned world champion.
Piastri has been outqualified for five grands prix in a row and seven times from the last eight rounds, and he trails Norris by two places and 36 points in the title standings, the largest margin between them since the end of 2024.
This is not where many, Piastri included, expected the Australian’s first half of the season to end.
Piastri rages at race-ruining incident | 03:07
HOW BAD IS IT REALLY?
There’s no doubt defending champion Norris has the ascendancy at McLaren right now.
But there’s also certainly a lot of hyperventilating about Piastri’s form, with claims that he’s being obliterated by his teammate or that he’s completely lost his way.
The data tells a slightly different story.
2026: Piastri vs. Norris in qualifying
Qualifying head to head: Piastri trails 4-7
Qualifying differential: Piastri behind 1.2 places
Time differential: Piastri slower by 0.052 seconds
Only grand prix qualifying sessions are being analysed here, with sprint qualifying excluded.
How does it compare to last year’s numbers?
2025: Piastri vs. Norris in qualifying
Qualifying head to head: Piastri trailed 11-13
Qualifying differential: Piastri behind 0.1 places
Time differential: Piastri slower by 0.067 seconds
We can see that Piastri, lap for lap, is slightly closer to Norris this season, but in 2026 it’s translating into a bigger qualifying position gap because McLaren is in a closer battle with more teams, shrinking the margin for error.
It’s a similar story when we compare the race results. Only grands prix in which both are classified finishers are counted in these statistics, with sprints excluded.
2026: Piastri vs. Norris in races
Race head to head: tied 3-3
Race differential: Piastri behind 0.3 places
Finishing differential: Piastri slower by 6.193 seconds
Points: Piastri adrift 92-128 points (42-58 per cent)
It’s perhaps closer than you’d think, particularly if you were looking only at the points table.
These numbers are also not far removed from last year’s results.
2025: Piastri vs. Norris in races
Race head to head: Piastri trailed 9-12
Race differential: Piastri behind 0.1 places
Finishing differential: Piastri slower by 3.030 seconds
Points: Piastri adrift 410-432 points (49-51 per cent)
It’s useful to consider the above data as our baseline in thinking back over Piastri’s half-season.
The baseline tells us that there is no disaster unfolding for Piastri at McLaren. The blowout isn’t borne out by the results.
It also tells us, though, that Piastri hasn’t kicked on from last year’s big leap forward — or, if he has, Norris has matched the gains.
Norris is surely bringing to bear the confidence of winning his first championship.
But there’s more to it than that.
‘Get out of the F***ing way you Idiot!’ | 00:46
TOO CLEAN, TOO SMOOTH
It’s difficult to separate the change in form from the change in regulations.
We’d developed an understanding of the differences between Piastri and Norris in the ground-effect era, but that car no longer exists, and the 2026 beat that’s replaced it is dramatically different.
The peculiar hybrid engine aside, this car needs to be driven differently to get the best out of it.
Lower in downforce, shorter in every dimension, lighter and with smaller tyres, the change is greater than the sum of its parts.
It’s a change that, on paper, would appear to play to Piastri’s weaknesses.
“I think the drivers are talking about this generation of cars requiring a certain driving style,” McLaren boss Andrea Stella hypothesised to Germany’s Sky Sport earlier this month.
“Basically, if you just try to drive too clean, the lap time doesn’t come. You have to attack the car, you have to accept that the car slides, you have to be extremely active.
“This is a driving style that comes more normal to Lando than Oscar.”
It sounds exactly like the conditions that undid Piastri’s championship campaign late last year.
The Australian has tended to excel when grip is high, braving the upper limit of the car’s potential. When the grip is low, however, it disrupts his rhythm.
It’s because Piastri’s driving style has long been characterised by a smooth, high-minimum-speed approach. He wants to roll the car through a wide arc over the apex, keeping it under control through the entire corner so that it’s ready to launch from the exit.
Norris, as just one example, drives differently. He prefers to hustle the car into rotating more sharply so that he can shorten the length of the corner. It’s a more active approach, requiring more input, but it also means he’s more comfortable in slippery conditions, when the car needs corralling because of the lack of grip.
There’s also a factor of confidence at play. To throw a car into the corner at high speed, a driver needs to be sure of how it’s going to react.
Both McLaren drivers have reported that this year’s McLaren is extremely susceptible to condition changes, like unpredictable winds or extreme temperatures. The sweet spot is harder to find.
It’s also clearly lacked competitiveness for most of the season, with the team eschewing major upgrades until the Budapest weekend as it sought to change design direction.
Drivers have also reported this year’s smaller Pirelli tyres are operating like a switch when it comes to grip — they either have grip or they don’t — narrowing the car’s operating window further.
These are not disastrous circumstances — again, see the data above — but they do appear to have played to some of Piastri’s weaknesses.
“We are working with Oscar to make sure that his natural application in terms of driving input takes these characteristics into account,” Stella continued.
“I think we will figure this out and Oscar will be able to express the full extent of his talent.”
Verstappen spins out in Q3 | 00:20
NO MORE HIGH-SPEED CORNERS
There’s a second element at play linked directly to the controversial 2026 hybrid engine.
The power unit has killed many of the sport’s most fearsome corners — and they’re all the sort of corner in which Piastri was at his most fearsome.
A fully charged battery in a Formula 1 car runs flat after around 11 seconds of deployment and therefore needs to be topped up around the lap.
Big braking zones do much of the work, but at tracks where there are few big stops, the charging focus shifts to high-speed corners, which become ‘super clipping’ zones to charge the power pack.
This has the double effect of greatly reducing speed through these bends. An F1 car running only on its combustion engine produces around 400 kilowatts, which is less than a Formula 2 car but with the same level of downforce.
As a result, speed through these high-speed corners is no longer limited by grip and daring, as it traditionally has been. Many of them are now easily flat because cars don’t have the power to make them challenging for the drivers anymore.
Consider Pouhon at Spa-Francorchamps, the fast downhill double-left. Last year Piastri was quicker through here with a subtle smaller lift of the throttle on entry.
This year both drivers were easily flat because they were travelling around 40 kilometres per hour slower, both cars out of battery. It was neutralised as a performance differentiator.
In the words of Sky Sports pundit Martin Brundle: “I’ve got a bit of a tear in my eye because we’ve lost all the great corners at Silverstone, and here we are at Spa with the same situation. These new regulations hurt us on the high-speed circuits.”
This isn’t Piastri’s only strength — and, as above, it’s not disastrous — but it was one of his key weapons.
Between the engine formula and the more skittish, cars, that particular strength has been neutralised.
Hamilton receives 3 spot grid penalty | 00:33
RECENT FORM HASN’T MATCHED THE RESULTS
There’s an interesting parallel here with George Russell, who also employs a similarly smooth driving style and has also struggled for consistency — and against a teammate with a more active approach behind the wheel.
It’s interesting too that both Russell and Piastri appear to have been more regularly dealt some of the 2026 engine’s bizarre behavioural defects.
Both drivers, for example, found themselves inexplicably down on straight-line speed at the final sector in Belgium, which Mercedes later discovered was the result of a glitch in the engine software that governs the hybrid components.
This glitch was in all Mercedes engines, but Russell and Piastri appear to have been the worst affected among the frontrunners — noting too that Mercedes believes driving style accounts for some of the power deficit given battery charge and cornering approach are connected.
Like Russell, however, that can’t account for everything and hasn’t played a major role as slower circuits. It was also patched in time for the weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix, where both drivers were handily outqualified.
When you’re only as good as your last race, Budapest will be the hook on which Piastri’s season will be looked back upon until racing resumes later this month.
But it’s important to put that race in some context before it’s written off as just the extension of Norris’s ascendancy.
It was only four rounds ago that Piastri outclassed Norris in Austria.
One round later, in Silverstone, Piastri was punted out of the race in a first-lap incident with Liam Lawson, the damage of which was compounded by his team delaying bringing him in by a lap because it didn’t realise he needed a new front wing.
In Belgium he was racing for a podium with Charles Leclerc when the Monegasque crashed into him, causing him up to 0.3 seconds per lap of damage. Leclerc finished second.
Then, in Hungary, an against-the-odds win was lost in contact with Sainz — after missing FP1, not getting the car’s upgrades until FP3 and then being blocked on his final Q3 lap in qualifying.
How different might we consider the form book had just had Piastri had a cleaner run?
Piastri responds to rumours | 01:14
NORRIS IS SHOWING THE WAY. CAN PIASTRI FOLLOW?
But there’s an undeniable final part of the story.
Norris is clearly operating on a very high level.
Some of that is surely the confidence of fulfilling his championship potential last year.
But another part is the effort required to win it — the effort required to overcome Piastri and, later, do just enough to fend off Max Verstappen.
“I would probably say [Hungary] was up there with one of my best performances in terms of extracting performance out of the car and being so close to the limit every single lap,” he said.
“I feel like I’m doing a better job this year than I was last year, and I have done for a little while.
“Today proved exactly that — that I could go out and win very convincingly and be on pole in a good car.
“I’m doing a better job, and that’s because of working in many different areas, some away from the track with my team and some here at the track as well.
“I’ve worked on many areas from last year. I feel much more confident lately with how to extract performance, and I’ve worked a lot with my engineers to understand this car because it’s certainly not an easy car to understand and figure out how to drive on the limit consistently.
“Just hard work — hard work from my engineers and from myself to improve me as a driver and improve my driving. That is the answer.
“A lot of small differences add up, and you see the result today.”
It was around this time last year that momentum began to swing from Piastri to Norris.
He was slightly quicker than Piastri in qualifying and was competitive enough in the race to claim an unforeseen victory with an obscure strategy play.
Piastri was faster than Norris over a single lap just three more times for the rest of the season and finished ahead of him only twice.
Some might argue that was the beginning of a negative trend, but the early phase of this season disproved that, with Piastri getting the better start in the opening rounds, and even now the gap between them is slender.
Instead what it proves is that it’s definitely not too late for Piastri to find another level and end his season positively.
This time last year, Norris was written off in his battle for supremacy against Piastri and, by extension, for the championship. He’d had trouble adapting to the car and fitting his driving style to its demands.
We know how that ended.
Cerebral Piastri has undoubtedly already formulated how he’ll change his approach in the second half of the season to overcome his own mismatch with the car.
After 11 rounds, by his own admission, his season has comprised my lows than highs. It would be a surprise if Piastri couldn’t rebalance that ledger by the end of the campaign.
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