Oscar Piastri said he believed the new Formula 1 season would play to his strengths.
This year, the new cars rely heavily on electric power, requiring a different driving style and management to execute not just the Grand Prix, but also a qualifying lap.
“There’s definitely going to be a higher level of mental work,” Piastri, of McLaren, said in an interview in February. “Generally, that’s a good thing for me. Having a lot of understanding, particularly at the beginning of this era, is going to be important because things operate so differently.
“There are going to be a lot of things I’ve never really had to think about or manage before, certainly not to the same extent or with the same consequences. That aspect probably does help me. From an approach as to how I go driving, how I try and find lap time, I don’t think it’s a bad thing.”
The engines are powered by a 50-50 split between combustion and electrical energy, while the battery is three times more powerful than in previous seasons. Throughout preseason testing, the drivers almost had to relearn how to drive a Formula 1 car.
Race starts, overtaking, energy deployment, regeneration and conservation have placed greater responsibility on the driver. Lewis Hamilton, a seven-time champion, said the new-look Formula 1 was “ridiculously complex” and that he “needed a degree to understand it all.”
Piastri, who begins the season in his hometown Melbourne, Australia, this weekend, understands Hamilton’s comments.
“There are a lot of quirks to the rules this year and the way the power units work,” Piastri said. “At certain tracks, that’s going to be much more obvious than others, and it’s going to present more challenges.
“Yes, there are going to be a lot of things that are not natural, not particularly intuitive that we’re going to have to do, so that’s going to take some getting used to, and unlearning some of the things we’ve learned, or transferring that knowledge to a different skill. That’s going to be a very important part of this.”
An example, he said, was overtaking. This year, the cars no longer possess the drag reduction system, or D.R.S. It has been replaced with active aero, adjustable front and rear wings to provide higher top speeds on the straights, and boost mode. At the press of a button, drivers can deploy the energy available to overtake.
“How overtaking works without D.R.S. anymore is going to be a bit different because it’s with the extra energy boost, but you have to recover that extra energy as well, so there’s that complication,” Piastri said.
“And in qualifying, at some of the circuits, there is going to be lift and coast. Qualifying in the past has always been about going flat out, as fast as you can, so trying to restrict ourselves is probably the biggest thing we’re all going to have to get on top of.”
Piastri said he was ready for the challenges of the new era, particularly after coming close to becoming world champion last year.
After the Dutch Grand Prix, the 15th of the 24 rounds, Piastri was 34 points ahead of Lando Norris, his McLaren teammate, and 104 points in front of Max Verstappen, a four-time champion, of Red Bull. Piastri had won seven races and been on the podium a further six times.
But he failed to win another race of the nine that followed, and only managed three more podiums. Norris won his first drivers’ title by 2 points from Verstappen, with Piastri 13 points behind.
Piastri said it was not easy to mentally reset after his championship challenge fizzled out. “Immediately after the season ended, and for a few days after, no,” he said. “You are always going to think about the things that could have gone better, and things you wish had gone a bit differently.
“But once I got back to Australia, and I was able to see my family, my friends and just enjoy life outside of F1 again for a couple of weeks, it was pretty easy to stay switched off, and such a big change coming up in F1 and so many things to focus on was nice.”
The battle with Norris was intense. It boiled over in the Italian and Singapore Grands Prix when Piastri felt team decisions went against him, leading to discussions during the off-season among the drivers and Andrea Stella, the team principal,
“I can certainly say that, like anything that we approach at McLaren, we go through a thorough process of review, so we can see where there are opportunities to improve,” Stella said in January. “Any attempt we can make to make going racing together simpler, to some extent, will be welcome.
“It is a matter of fine-tuning, because once we reviewed what we had done, in most of the cases we said that’s exactly what we would still do again, but we found a few opportunities to streamline the way in which we operate collectively.”
Norris said Piastri would provide him with a challenge again this year, but with the added complication of the new regulations and no guarantee either would be at the front of the field as they were last season.
“He’s still slightly newer to the world of Formula 1, but it’s not like he’s a rookie anymore,” Norris said. “He knows his stuff, was on form last year.
“Everyone knows what he can do, and he’ll show exactly what he did last year, that he can be an incredible driver and be a world champion. So I expect him to make my life hell.”
This season will be Piastri’s fourth in Formula 1, with each of the previous three providing a learning curve. He feels better equipped to tackle this year’s challenges.
“I felt like through 2023 and 2024, I added all the tools I needed,” he said. “Certainly, at the end of 2024, I had everything I wanted and felt that I needed. I just didn’t put it together enough.
“In 2025, I put it together much more often, and that was the big difference. In 2024, I made a lot of weekends difficult with qualifying performances, but last year, qualifying was significantly better, and that naturally set up weekends much more nicely, so it was about extracting the most out of my potential more often. That was probably the biggest thing.”
The problem for Piastri was that the latter part of the season did not go as smoothly as he wanted for several reasons — some personal, some team-related — leading to a shift in focus during the off-season.
“It was about diagnosing some of the things that could have gone better and where we want to improve, but always with the lens of how is that going to look in 2026,” he said. “A lot of the things we’ve had to focus on this year are very different to what we’ve had to focus on previously.
“It’s been a balancing act of looking back on some of the things that apply to 2026 and then just putting as much focus as possible on the new things for 2026.”
Piastri and McLaren emerged from testing unsure of where they stand in the pecking order. Zak Brown, the chief executive of the team, said he felt his team was only fourth best behind Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull.
After the time spent in the car during testing in Barcelona and Bahrain, Piastri said he at least had “a better understanding of how the car likes to be driven, what it likes to do, and what it doesn’t.”
As to where he feels McLaren lies, he said: “I hope we’re somewhere towards the front, but I definitely don’t have the confidence to say we’re the leader at the moment.”
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