Oscar Piastri didn’t need a simulator session or another meeting in a grey motorhome to sum up what’s bugging a lot of the 2026 grid. He just needed a few laps in a car McLaren built almost two decades ago.
Ahead of the Miami Grand Prix, Piastri climbed into the MP4/23 — the Lewis Hamilton-driven machine that won the 2008 world championship — during a McLaren fan event. What stuck with him wasn’t some misty-eyed reverence for a museum piece. It was how immediately legible the experience felt: noise, response, feel. Less “management”, more driving.
“It was cool. It’s always fun to drive an old car,” Piastri said in Miami, speaking in a press conference alongside Nico Hülkenberg and Sergio Perez. “The noise was pretty special, a bit simpler and just the feeling you get from it is pretty cool.
“It’s obviously a cool day for us as a team, but driving a naturally aspirated V8 was cool.”
That last line lands with extra weight in 2026 because power units have become the paddock’s favourite argument again. The FIA has opened the door to tweaks following April meetings, as the sport wrestles with a recurring theme since the new rules arrived: the battery management demands are proving a hard sell for drivers who’d rather push than harvest.
Piastri was asked for his favourite and least favourite aspects of F1’s current era, and he delivered the sort of deadpan that plays well in a media pen.
“I still get to call myself an F1 driver… That’s always a cool thing to say,” he quipped.
Then he got to the point.
“The least favourite thing… In all seriousness, driving a car from 2008 yesterday and seeing some of the cool cars from the past, I think trying to recapture some of those things would be very cool for the future,” he said. “As to the product, I think clearly, we’re making changes to try and improve it.”
It’s notable how quickly a conversation about “the product” — that grim bit of industry language everyone uses when they’re trying not to start a fight — ends up back at first principles. Piastri isn’t campaigning for nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. He’s pointing to something the sport risks misplacing when the engineering task becomes dominated by energy deployment targets and corner-by-corner compromises: the immediacy that makes an F1 car feel alive.
The 2026 chassis rules were supposed to help there. The cars are lighter, smaller and more nimble, with around 30 kilograms taken out compared to the outgoing ground-effect machines. But Hülkenberg played down how transformative that loss feels from the cockpit, and Piastri’s answer was revealing — not just in the numbers, but in what they imply about where the sport’s limits now sit.
“I mean, I don’t know what weight the car I drove yesterday was,” he started, before being told the 2008 minimum was 605kg.
“But realistically, to make a big difference the number needs to be probably 50 plus, probably closer to 100, in all honesty,” Piastri said. “The cars are still very heavy. I think if we could get it back into a figure starting with six, in the 600s somewhere, that would probably be good.”
That’s the heart of it. The current reduction is welcome, but it’s not the seismic shift the rulebook’s marketing promised. And Piastri, like plenty of drivers, is effectively saying: if you want the cars to feel fundamentally different, you’re going to need a fundamentally different approach.
But he also acknowledged the political and technical reality behind the weight problem — and why everyone keeps circling back to the power unit.
“We’re never going to get back to 500s or high 500s,” he said. “I think the only way you can get there is taking out the battery and making the engines simpler, but I don’t think you necessarily need to do that.”
There’s a tension in that answer that sums up the 2026 debate neatly. Drivers miss the directness; teams and manufacturers have committed to a hybrid-heavy roadmap; the FIA is trying to keep the show moving without rewriting the whole premise. Piastri even made the counterpoint that often gets lost when the conversation turns into “old good, new bad”.
“The cars last year we had in high-speed corners were probably some of the best we’ve ever had. Granted, I know mine was probably the best of the lot,” he said, “but I think you can achieve some of that realistically… I don’t know the numbers of the weight of the engine and stuff, but if we had a simpler engine then you could easily take out quite a bit of weight, I think.
“But whether that’s actually beneficial for the sport, is a completely different question.”
And that’s where this leaves F1 as it tries to fine-tune a ruleset that’s only just arrived. The current engine formula is locked in until the end of 2030, so nobody should expect a romantic return to naturally aspirated simplicity on a regulatory whim. But Piastri’s Miami detour in the MP4/23 did something useful: it put a sensory, human reference point back into a discussion that too often gets buried in deployment graphs.
In other words, it reminded everyone what “better” is supposed to feel like — and why, in an era of clever systems and cleverer compromises, that might be the hardest thing of all to engineer back in.
