Oscar Piastri at the United States GP - Photo: RacePictures

Stella pinpoints Piastri weakness after disappointing United States GP

12:48, 23 Oct

Updated: 13:16, 23 Oct

byBen Winship

McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella has revealed the United States GP exposed Oscar Piastri’s weakness in low grip conditions.

“This is an area of his driving that has an opportunity to improve and in Oscar's standards this means that you will improve pretty fast."

- Andrea Stella on Oscar Piastri

The championship leader was off the pace all weekend and finished a distant P5, around 21 seconds behind teammate Lando Norris in second place.

The Australian is experiencing a poor run of results which has seen his championship margin fall to just 14 points with five events remaining.

Simply lacking in pace

Piastri had the better of Norris in first half of the season but is now on a difficult run of form that has seen him finish ahead of his teammate twice in the last nine Grand Prix.

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Whereas at the Azerbaijan GP a rare series of mistakes plagued Piastri, in Austin it appeared that the championship leader was simply lacking in pace.

Stella said: “This is certainly one of the most important points that we need to review, which is the fact that Oscar, in qualifying and in the race, he seemed to have a couple of tents that he was not able to fully realise and that possibly was available in the car.

“We are actually now checking that we are completely happy with the setup of the car, the setup of the floor, that everything is as intended from a car point of view and at the same time, we'll be looking at the driving.

“I think we know with Oscar that when the conditions are such that we have low grip you really need to challenge the car, lean on the understeer, oversteer, locking.

Andrea Stella on the pit wall- Photo: Race Pictures

“This is an area of his driving that has an opportunity to improve and in Oscar's standards this means that you will improve pretty fast and I think today we got quite a lot of information that adds to the information we got yesterday.

“I think we have already this morning, we had some conversations with Oscar as to what we can do to extract more. So I think this is just data to learn and Oscar will learn pretty soon.”

A quick turnaround

Piastri will be hoping to find answers quickly as F1 travels to Mexico for back-to-back races in the Americas.

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Mexico city’s Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez has not been a happy hunting ground for Piastri in his short F1 career. In the two times he has raced in Mexico he has finished P8 and behind teammate Norris both times.

With a gap of just 14 points to Norris and a surging Max Verstappen now only 40 points behind also, Piastri will be hoping to turn his poor form around at the Mexican GP.

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