Oscar Piastri didn’t need a whiteboard to explain what’s wrong with racing in F1 right now. He just pointed at the “boost” button.
Speaking after the British Grand Prix weekend, the McLaren driver argued that overtaking has drifted into a lottery driven less by preparation and execution and more by who happens to deploy battery at the right moment — and, crucially, who guesses right about what everyone else is doing.
Silverstone’s sprint, in particular, served up a blunt illustration. Cars swapped places in clusters off the line and through the opening laps, but much of it wasn’t the old-fashioned ebb and flow of tyre phases or DRS traps. It was energy. Who had it. Who spent it. Who burned it for nothing.
“It’s tough, because some of the moves genuinely are still very good, but some of them really aren’t,” Piastri said. “When you’re racing four people, especially on the first few laps, there’s such a massive element of luck now.”
His complaint isn’t that the cars can’t follow — it’s that the decisive moments often come from committing to deployment earlier than feels natural, without knowing whether the driver behind is about to hit the same button. That turns what should be a clean, readable fight into a guessing game.
Piastri laid out a sprint scenario that will be familiar to anyone who’s watched a modern F1 start unfold in a pack: he used boost to close rapidly on George Russell on the straight, only to arrive too quickly and have to brake before the corner. Energy gone, opportunity wasted — except he hadn’t even used it purely to attack Russell. He’d pressed it to keep Charles Leclerc honest behind him. Leclerc didn’t deploy, meaning Piastri had effectively spent a chunk of his race’s “ammo” reacting to a threat that never materialised.
“So this was a whole bunch of energy for no reason,” he said. “But the only reason I pushed the button was to keep Charles behind, and he didn’t push it… it’s just a massive game of flipping a coin, basically.
“All the deployment around you and sometimes it works for you, sometimes it doesn’t. This is a very extreme example for that, but it’s a shame in the car when you like to do something great, and then you just get passed again the next time.”
There’s a telling line in there: “when you like to do something great.” Drivers can feel when a pass is earned — when it’s been set up over laps, when it’s about positioning the car, forcing the other guy defensive, committing on the brakes. And they can feel when it’s basically a timed electrical overtake that’s more about who’s got their deployment map in the right window.
Piastri’s frustration with the “energy problem” isn’t new either. He’d already branded it “a mess” after an opening-lap clash with Liam Lawson that left his McLaren wounded and his race effectively derailed.
Starting eighth at Silverstone, Piastri was quickly dragged into the kind of midfield turbulence that the current rules have made especially spiky: multiple cars arriving at the same braking zones with very different closing speeds, because the energy deployment picture isn’t consistent from car to car or moment to moment.
“He started eighth but got swallowed up,” was the story of his first lap, and the detail matters: he was boxed in, tagged, and left with major front wing damage.
“I got sandwiched on the way to Turn Six, basically. Broke the front wing and had to box,” Piastri explained. “Lap 1 on these kind of circuits is just carnage.
“It’s almost like a multi-pass race start.”
That’s a sharp description, because it captures what those first-lap runs have become in 2026: not a single concertina into Turn 1, but a sequence of mini drag races, each one shaped by who deploys and who doesn’t — sometimes to attack, sometimes purely to defend, often without full information.
Piastri’s example was blunt. “I was trying to overtake Lindblad, and I seemed like I had more power than him. Lawson then passed me and seemed like he had even more power than me.”
That’s the core of it: drivers are trying to judge closing speeds and braking points while also second-guessing the car in front and checking the mirrors — and the speed differentials can change in an instant. The result is a pack that looks spectacular but can feel, from inside the cockpit, like controlled chaos.
“It’s just a mess,” Piastri said. “You’re trying to judge your speed to the car in front of you, look at the car behind you but to be honest, I’m surprised that doesn’t happen more often.”
It’s not a plea to make overtaking harder. It’s a warning about the kind of racing F1 is incentivising: one where the driver’s best instinct is to gamble early and hope the others guess wrong. Sometimes it produces a brilliant move. Sometimes it produces a near-miss. And, as Piastri found out, sometimes it produces a broken front wing before the race has even settled into shape.
For all the talk of drivers “managing” modern grand prix racing, Piastri’s comments cut to something more uncomfortable. If the sharp end of wheel-to-wheel combat is increasingly decided by timing a battery button against three other unknowns, that’s not management — that’s roulette with carbon fibre consequences.
