Oscar Piastri has significantly underperformed his McLaren teammate Lando Norris this season, team boss Andrea Stella believes the Australian must make an uncomfortable adjustment: abandon some of the driving habits that helped make him a race winner.
After winning seven Grands Prix in 2025 and leading the championship for 15 races, Piastri has found the transition to Formula 1’s radically different 2026 machinery far less rewarding.
While Norris has established a sizeable advantage in the intra-team battle, thanks in part to consecutive wins in Hungary and the Netherlands, Piastri has managed just two podium finishes this season, his latest coming with third place in Miami all the way back in May.
But Stella is not pointing the finger at a sudden loss of talent or commitment. Instead, he believes the characteristics that once made Piastri such an effective and consistent performer are proving less suited to McLaren’s current car.
The problem, in other words, is not simply finding more speed. It is learning how to extract it from a machine that demands a different kind of aggression.
Piastri must ‘force the car to do some things’
The 2026 cars have brought a fundamental change in how aerodynamic performance is generated, while the rear end is noticeably less planted than it was under the previous ground-effect regulations.
For a driver whose strengths have included precision, cleanliness and consistency, that shift has created an awkward learning curve.
Stella believes Piastri has taken longer than Norris to get to grips with the demands, explaining that the current McLaren requires a much more forceful approach behind the wheel.
“The car needs quite a lot of effort to deliver lap time, and it requires a level of intensity in the driving input, which is much superior to last year,” Stella told reporters in Singapore.
“This is something that took some time for the drivers to get comfortable. Well, comfortable is wrong, but to get to understand, and it’s also one of the reasons why Oscar almost looks like he lost some of the competitiveness compared to Lando.
“We were discussing what is happening with Oscar, and I’ve always said that that was a technical matter. Oscar just needed to understand how to force the car to do some things and sort of abandon the fact that driving fast will not necessarily mean driving clean.
“Instead, probably the signature of Oscar, when we have seen him fast in the past, was that he was clean. It was really good data to see.
“It was very repeatable, and it was fast. With this car, all these things together don’t seem to happen very often. So it’s a lot of work for the drivers.”
Stella’s assessment offers a revealing insight into Piastri’s predicament. His natural approach has traditionally delivered speed without sacrificing precision, giving McLaren a driver capable of producing consistently strong laps.
The new cars, however, appear to demand compromises that do not come naturally to him.
And while Stella has framed the issue as technical rather than a fundamental problem with Piastri’s ability, the Australian still has work to do to close the gap to his team-mate.
A McLaren upgrade is unlikely to provide an easy fix
Help may arrive in the form of further developments, with McLaren preparing a new upgrade package for the closing stages of the campaign. Yet Stella has played down the prospect of those changes transforming the car’s behaviour.
The Italian believes that adding aerodynamic performance alone will not resolve the underlying challenge confronting his drivers. A more fundamental rethink is required, and that points towards the team’s longer-term development programme rather than a quick fix for 2026.
“I don’t expect that what’s coming to the car will improve this characteristic,” he added.
“I think we need something more fundamental than simply adding some downforce to the car, like it’s happening in the coming races, without fundamentally changing some further aspect, which we are addressing longer term, I would say with the MCL41 for 2027.”
That leaves Piastri facing a two-pronged challenge. He must continue adapting to a car that appears to reward a more aggressive style, while McLaren works on deeper changes that may not bear fruit until next season.
For a driver who spent much of 2025 looking like a genuine championship contender, the reversal has been stark. Stella’s comments suggest there is no single switch to flick, nor any guarantee that an aerodynamic upgrade will suddenly restore Piastri’s former competitive edge.
The task is more fundamental: learning to make an increasingly demanding car work on his terms, even if that means abandoning some of the qualities that once made his speed look so effortless.
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