How McLaren driver Oscar Piastri assesses his weekend performance at Zandvoort and what he wants to change to keep up with teammate Lando Norris
0.499 seconds off a fast lap in qualifying, and then 27.337 seconds off a fast lap at the finish after 72 laps at Zandvoort. That was the gap between the two McLaren drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri. Too big, if Piastri has his way. The Australian Formula 1 driver is emphatically self-critical after the Dutch Grand Prix
“The bottom line is that I simply wasn’t at Lando’s level this weekend,” says Piastri. “I have to do my homework. I have to make sure that I’m also where the fun starts. Because being consistent is not good enough. And when your teammate wins by 20 seconds, there is clearly room for improvement.”
And not just over the race distance, as Piastri makes clear. His difficulties in Zandvoort “realistically started in qualifying”, he says. “I wasn’t competitive enough there. I didn’t get it right on the last lap and that hurts.”
In Q2, the two McLaren drivers had been classified in positions one and two practically at the same time: Norris with a 1:10.496 and Piastri with a 1:10.505. Only 0.009 seconds apart.
Then came Q3, and Norris’ improvement was greater than Piastri’s: with a time of 1:10.074 minutes, Norris remained well ahead of Piastri, who only clocked 1:10.193 minutes. And in the second attempt, Piastri only improved to 1:10.172, where Norris improved to 1:09.673 minutes and put half a second between himself and his team-mate.
Constantly in turbulent air during the race
And things didn’t go Piastri’s way in the race either: his third position on the grid was wiped out in the first few meters and he only returned from the starting lap in fourth place. “That didn’t help, of course, because after that we were a bit stuck,” says Piastri. “And that was the end of my race. “
Unfortunately, he spent “60 of 72 laps one second behind another car”, says the McLaren driver. But it wasn’t quite that bad: he was only within DRS distance of George Russell in the Mercedes in front of him for the first six laps and from lap 45 onwards he was also in the DRS window behind Charles Leclerc in the Ferrari for a total of eight laps. Otherwise there was always more air to the front
Piastri a victim of the surprising Ferrari surge
However, driving in traffic “made life pretty difficult” for him, says Piastri. He was therefore unable to realize the McLaren MCL38’s actually “pretty good” pace. Norris proved that the car was “clearly very fast” at the front.
But while Norris even overtook world championship leader Max Verstappen in the Red Bull, Piastri failed with his attacks on Ferrari driver Leclerc, who was much stronger on Sunday than he had been in qualifying on Saturday. However, Ferrari cannot explain this improvement in form.
It also came as a “surprise” to Piastri, as he says. “But that happens with the current generation of cars. “We’ve had it ourselves in some races. Sometimes the exact opposite can happen: That you have a really strong Saturday and a less exhilarating Sunday.”
In Piastri’s case, neither happened at Zandvoort: his Saturday was already not good and Sunday even less so. This worries the McLaren driver, and he promises: “I’ll make sure I’m back to full strength next week.” However, Piastri did not say exactly how he intends to achieve this
