McLaren F1 Boss Opens Up About Secrets of Piastri’s Speed
McLaren Formula 1 team principal Andrea Stella has shed light on the factors that have contributed to Oscar Piastri’s impressive performance this season, which has seen him claim four grand prix wins and take the championship lead. According to Stella, Piastri’s improvement can be attributed to his increased speed, which has enabled him to process more information and make the most of the marginal gains that can make all the difference in the highly competitive world of Formula 1.
In a recent interview with Autosport, Piastri himself described the marginal-gains approach that he feels has been instrumental in his success. “Trying to find little bits everywhere” was how he put it. “It’s quite a different feeling when you win a race because you feel like you’ve just gotten by or had good circumstances,” he said. “But to now be winning because we have an incredibly quick car and I feel like I’m driving well, that’s very satisfying.”
Stella, who has worked with the likes of Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso as a race engineer, was typically detailed when asked what Piastri had done to elevate himself to the next level this season. “Well, I think the most important improvement, if anything, is that Oscar has become a faster driver,” he said. “I think when you’re a faster driver, then you have more opportunity to process, more time to process, more bandwidth to process things. This is true when you are in the car, and this is also true when you are outside the car – because, like, the speed is there, let’s process all the other marginal gains that will then, at the end of the weekend, constitute the performance you need to have the kind of results he’s having at the moment.”
Piastri had previously talked about using his time more intelligently, and identifying particular areas of improvement rather than, say, spending more hours in the simulator. “It’s just been about how you do things more efficiently,” he said. “How you take the next step up in your preparation. Experience naturally helps. Some of the things that you have to concentrate on become more natural, so you’re constantly learning – and that experience definitely helps. But the preparation has mostly been the same. We’ve just been trying to find those little bits in every column. There hasn’t been one big change – just trying to find little bits everywhere.”
Team insiders say that while much of the commentary surrounding Piastri has focused on him needing to sharpen up on qualifying performance and tyre management during his first two seasons, to express this in such binary terms was doing Oscar a disservice. They say he was operating at a very high level when he arrived at McLaren, and that the disparities between him and team-mate Lando Norris in terms of one-lap pace and tyre-whispering were very small. According to Autosport, Piastri has a remarkable ability to assess a lap in terms of where he can improve and how much time could be found where – before looking at the data to prove it out.
Stella also signalled the influence of Piastri’s ‘support network’ – not just the engineers he works with, but the gritty former F1 driver who superintends his business affairs and is always on hand with sage advice. “Over the winter, there’s been a very specific amount of work that has paid attention to different areas, it’s been quite holistic,” said Stella. “And while Oscar is definitely the main one to praise for these developments, I would like to mention the team around Oscar – his engineers and all the support from the factory, with all the analysis. And even the
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