Oscar Piastri has moved to swat away one of the stranger subplots of last season: the suggestion McLaren somehow “sabotaged” his 2025 title bid.
Speaking during pre-season running in Bahrain with the MCL40, Piastri was emphatic there was no malice inside the team as his championship challenge unravelled — but he didn’t pretend McLaren handled everything cleanly either. If anything, his message was more cutting in a different way: the intentions were fine, the execution sometimes wasn’t, and McLaren made life harder than it needed to.
Piastri’s 2025 arc is the sort of thing that fuels conspiracy talk in a sport that never misses an opportunity for it. At one point he was the clear favourite, sitting on a 34-point lead, only to end the year third as Lando Norris surged to a first World Championship. McLaren, for its part, stuck to the principle of giving both drivers a fair crack — the team’s much-discussed “papaya rules” — and that stance inevitably meant every borderline call was going to be litigated in public.
It got so noisy that the chatter even spilled into Australian politics, where a member of parliament publicly questioned whether McLaren bias was costing Piastri a world title. Asked about it, Piastri’s response was telling: he took it less as an insult and more as a marker of how invested people had become.
“Yeah, I saw, and I think, for me, the takeaway from that was just how closely everyone was supporting it, more than than anything else,” he said.
Then came the line McLaren will be relieved to hear on the record, even if it’s paired with a gentle sting.
“There were certainly no bad intentions last year,” Piastri insisted. “I think as a team, we know that there’s things that we could have done a better job of, things we could have done differently, and I know that as well.
“But, at no point were there any bad intentions, or certainly no sabotage, like I’ve seen around a few times.”
The nuance matters. Piastri isn’t asking anyone to rewrite history and pretend McLaren’s intra-team management was flawless; he’s essentially saying the team got caught in its own framework. The “papaya rules” were meant to keep things clean and avoid the sort of toxic internal politics that can crater a season. Instead, as McLaren found itself repeatedly in tight, high-stakes scenarios, the rules sometimes created extra pressure rather than removing it.
Monza was a flashpoint. Norris had been ahead on track but pitted second; a slow stop dropped him behind Piastri, and McLaren asked Piastri to yield. Those are the moments that define reputations — and once a fanbase decides it sees a pattern, every radio message becomes “evidence”.
McLaren isn’t binning the papaya rules for 2026, and Piastri isn’t campaigning for that either. What he wants is a cleaner, less stressful version of the same philosophy: keep it fair, but stop wandering into self-inflicted complexity.
“I think it is just streamlining it, really,” he said. “I think last year we got ourselves into some scenarios we didn’t need to necessarily, and added a lot more stress to certain things than was probably necessary.”
That’s a pretty direct admission of an operational problem — not in the sense that McLaren didn’t care, but that it occasionally overcomplicated simple calls. In a title fight, you don’t get points for being morally tidy; you get points for being decisive and correct.
Piastri said the team has used the winter to review those moments and come back with something more workable.
“I think we’ve all, in the off-season, taken some time to look back on that and realise that there’s things we need to do differently,” he said. “And again, I think all of those scenarios we found ourselves in came from good intentions, but they required a lot of effort at certain points. So I think we’ve got some good ideas on how we’re going to streamline it.”
What’s interesting is the way he frames the target. It isn’t “let me race” in the simplistic, chest-thumping way drivers sometimes reach for. It’s more pragmatic: race as fairly as possible, while still maximising the team’s haul — and accept that context changes depending on where you are in the championship.
“The biggest message is we want to go racing as fairly as we can, whilst, trying to get the most points for the team,” Piastri said. “And again, it’s a bit different if you’re fighting for first and second in the World Championship or a little bit further back, so we’ll see what our competitiveness is like, but I think we’ve got a good plan on how we can make things a little bit easier for ourselves.”
That last line does a lot of work. McLaren’s entire conversation about driver management only becomes existential if the car is good enough to put both drivers in the fight again. If the MCL40 is a front-runner, the team’s revised approach will be stress-tested immediately — not just by Norris and Piastri, but by the microscope that comes with being a title favourite.
For Piastri personally, 2026 is also about reclaiming narrative control. He’s not denying last year hurt — you don’t cough up a 34-point advantage and shrug it off — but he is trying to shut down the idea that he lost because of some shadowy internal preference. What he’s describing sounds far more familiar in modern F1: a top team attempting to be equitable, finding out that “equitable” can get messy at 200mph, and deciding it needs fewer grey areas next time.
It’s a grown-up position, and it leaves McLaren with nowhere to hide. If the rules are truly streamlined, the next critical call won’t be buffered by process and paperwork. It’ll just be a decision — and in a title fight, those tend to follow you all the way to the last race.
