Oscar Piastri has admitted his 2026 season has comprised “more lows than highs” but hopes he and his McLaren team can fight back in the second half of the year with an upgraded car.
Piastri led the 2025 championship for more races than any other driver before a late wobble saw him lose the title to teammate Lando Norris by 13 points, with the resurgent Max Verstappen splitting the McLaren pair.
McLaren claimed the constructors championship comfortably off the back of the efforts of its evenly matched driver line-up for its first title double since 1998.
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But this year’s sweeping regulatory changes have halted McLaren’s momentum. Though it was the second-best team behind Mercedes early in the season, it’s slumped to fourth behind Ferrari and Red Bull Racing in recent months as it’s fallen behind in the upgrade game.
Though there’s been little to split Piastri from reigning champion Norris for much of the year, the Briton has taken the ascendancy during the European season, outqualifying Piastri 4-1 in the last five grands prix.
Ahead of the mid-season break, which follows this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix, the 2024 Budapest winner admitted the follow-up season to the first championship challenge of his career hasn’t gone the way he’d hoped.
“There have been highs and lows for sure — probably more lows than highs, unfortunately,” he said.
“There have been some good moments, some not-so-good moments and pretty much everything in between.
“I want to be able to improve and be a bit more consistently on top of my game, and hopefully we can do that this weekend and in the second half of the year.”
A significant part of the challenge of finding performance this season has been mastering the hybrid power unit, which requires drivers to prioritise charging the battery to ensure speed down the straights.
The driving style required can be particularly counterintuitive at circuits that offer few natural charging opportunities.
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Piastri said understanding how to get the most from the engine was the defining early difficulty.
“In the first part of the year we were doing a really good job of understanding the rules and understanding what we needed to do, because since the tweaks in Miami, how we need to drive and some of the things we need to do are a lot closer to natural than they were in Suzuka, for example.
“It was quite a weird experience of how you had to drive to go fast, so I think we were doing a very good job of maximising those unnatural things.
“But since then, everyone else has brought a lot of upgrades as well. We’ve brought some, and maybe not all of them have worked as well as we wanted.”
He also said the McLaren car had become more difficult to master as the team has sought to squeeze performance from it without significant upgrades.
“I think maybe at the start of the season we had more to worry about on the power unit side of things in terms of stuff we could actually control and manage ourselves and things I could do with my driving style,” he said.
“Now there are still things we need to be careful of with the power unit, but it’s not really in our control as much anymore; it’s more purely about what the car is like, what the balance is like.
“I think especially the last couple of weekends it’s definitely been a step harder to drive for whatever reason — whether it’s just the layout, wind or type of tarmac, we don’t really know, but hopefully this weekend that becomes a bit easier.
“I feel like in those couple of races [where McLaren did well] it was almost the exception to our pace rather than the baseline, so hopefully we can get back to that soon.”
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McLaren boss Andrea Stella revealed earlier this month that the team had pursued some wayward design concepts that have had to be corrected, leading to a long delay between major upgrades.
The team last brought a major update to the Miami Grand Prix in May.
This weekend, however, will see the first phase of a two-step upgrade brought the car, which Piastri hopes can begin to generate some momentum for the defending constructors champion.
“We’ll find out tomorrow [in practice],” he said. “I think we should be a bit more competitive.
“We’ve got a few upgrades this weekend, so hopefully that puts us a bit closer to being able to fight.
“It should be faster. That’s all I care about. I feel like we’ve got a pretty good track record with upgrades for the most part and how they perform in the sim versus reality, so fingers crossed it just makes us quicker.
“For us as a team it’s obviously not been the first half of the year that we would have liked, especially compared to last year, so hopefully the second half of the year can be better.”
ENGINE STILL A QUESTION MARK
A question mark for Piastri remains over engine usage, which consumed paddock discussion after the Belgian Grand Prix.
The layout of Spa-Francorchamps exposed some of the worst vices of the 2026 engine, which was running on combustion power only for much of the lap given the dearth of recharging opportunities.
That in turn exposed how the engine’s software is playing a decisive role in managing electrical power based on driver inputs through the corners and even uncontrollable variables like wind speed and track grip.
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Piastri and George Russell were both hurt by the Mercedes engine algorithm in qualifying in Belgium, leaving them down on engine power in the final sector.
Mercedes has since said it has found and fixed a bug in the code that caused the problem, but Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has insisted that accounts for only around half of the deficit, with the rest down to driving style.
Piastri, though, believes there’s a certain amount that remains out of control of the drivers.
“We’ve got no control over where the deployment happens, more or less,” he said. “You can push the boost button, but that’s more for overtaking than in qualifying.
“Like I said in Spa, when you’ve got those differences there that you have no control over, it can be frustrating.
“I think Spa was particularly frustrating not just for me but for quite a lot of others because those small differences in the code and what the engines did made quite a big difference in lap time.
“Especially at the front of the field, I think there were still only 0.09 seconds or something separating four positions, and there were definitely more than 0.09 seconds on the table for quite a few drivers from things they could not control.
“I’m sure it’ll get better. I don’t expect it to ever fully go away, but as the manufacturers understand it more and work out the regulation restrictions more in terms of what the code can and can’t do, hopefully things will become a bit better.”
He was hopeful hat Hungary’s more technical layout, featuring few long straights, would minimise the influence of engine software in performance.
“Here I really don’t expect there to be many problems at all with that kind of thing, because the straights are so much shorter, so even if there are differences, they should be a lot less,” he said.
“But the principle of driving a race car that loses effectively half of its power before the end of the straight is hard to get your head around sometimes.”
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