Oscar Piastri doesn’t sound like a driver waiting for the next big aero tweak or a circuit-specific set-up trick to move the needle. In his view, the quickest way to find lap time in 2026 still lives in the most unglamorous place: how well you harvest, store and deploy energy over a lap.
Speaking at Silverstone, the McLaren driver was blunt about where the gains are — and, by extension, where the headaches still sit for teams trying to make sense of the new-era power units week after week.
“We do hundreds of laps in the simulator with us, test drivers, offline simulations, because at the moment power units are the biggest area for lap time still,” Piastri said. “We have a pretty good idea of what we think will be optimal, or at least what’s very close to it, but you can’t magically generate energy out of thin air, which is what we all want to do.”
That line lands with a bit of extra weight at McLaren, because the team has already been open about the learning curve that comes with running as a Mercedes customer under this set of regulations. Andrea Stella admitted early in the season that McLaren needed time to properly understand how to extract the best from Mercedes High Performance Powertrains’ hardware, with the obvious disadvantage being knowledge depth versus the factory operation.
As things stand nearing the halfway point of the campaign, McLaren are third in the Constructors’ Championship, and a long way off the pace-setters — 154 points behind Mercedes at the top. That’s not the sort of gap you blame on one corner here or one qualifying run there. It’s structural, and Piastri’s comments are a reminder that, in a year where margins are still heavily dictated by power unit behaviour, understanding the “when” and “how” of deployment is effectively performance.
What’s telling is that Piastri doesn’t buy into the idea that a Sprint weekend rewrites the rulebook. The constraints are the constraints; the job is simply to arrive with the best approximation of the answer before the cars even roll.
“The only thing that would change things massively is physics or different engines, which we’re not going to get, obviously,” he said. “We do so much preparation with these engines – we’re certainly not just rocking up on the track and seeing what happens.”
If that sounds like an attempt to lower expectations for surprise turnarounds, it also hints at how locked-in teams are by the new energy management realities. There’s only so much creativity available once you’re into parc fermé and living with the hardware you’ve got.
Silverstone, and the upcoming trip to Spa, put that reality front and centre. Both are viewed in the paddock as “energy-starved” venues — places where the opportunities to recharge don’t quite keep up with the demand to deploy, leaving drivers exposed at awkward moments on long straights and in sequences where you’d normally expect performance to be more stable.
Piastri painted a picture that will be familiar to anyone who’s watched the slightly chaotic racing this season, where closing speeds can look exaggerated and momentum swings can happen in places that feel counterintuitive.
“At some tracks there’s been quite a good balance,” he said. “In Austria, for example, was actually a pretty good balance.
“I think the risk on all these energy-starved circuits is you end up with crazy situations where someone’s half a second faster in one straight, half a second slower in the next, and at certain points it’s dangerous.”
That’s the bit viewers don’t always see — the sense that the car isn’t simply fast or slow, but fast in bursts dictated by what the system allows you to do rather than what you’d choose to do. Piastri noted there can be “30 or 40 kilometres an hour differences in a straight line”, with drivers largely passengers to it if deployment is forced at a time they wouldn’t pick, or if they’re simply out of battery.
And while he conceded it can be entertaining, he also pushed back on the armchair version of events.
“It’s entertaining,” he said. “I think on TV it looks much, much more simple than it is behind the wheel…”
That tension — between spectacle and control — has been part of the 2026 story so far. The “yo-yo” effect has produced overtakes and counter-overtakes that look almost choreographed from certain camera angles, but inside the cockpit it’s a constant recalculation: where can I defend, where can I attack, and where am I about to be a sitting duck because the energy picture has turned against me?
For McLaren, it all loops back to Stella’s early-season point: being a customer team in a power unit-dominated era comes with a steep information tax. You can do the sim laps, crunch the numbers and arrive at the track with a plan that’s “very close” to optimal — but the last few percent often comes from the sort of ingrained understanding that the factory outfit has been building since day one.
Piastri’s not dressing it up. In 2026, you’re not hunting lap time with wishful thinking or clever soundbites. You’re hunting it in the cold, repetitive grind of preparation — and even then, there are weekends where the laws of energy accounting are going to make a few cars look like they’ve found a cheat code, even when they haven’t.
