Formula 1 championship leader Oscar Piastri has lacked confidence all weekend at the United States Grand Prix, which is turning into a very costly struggle.
Piastri crashed out of the Austin sprint race at the first corner after turning into Nico Hulkenberg’s Sauber, then being pitched into McLaren team-mate Lando Norris.
He will start sixth for Sunday’s main race, four places behind Norris - who Piastri was 0.279s slower than in FP1, 0.309s slower than in sprint qualifying, and then 0.283s slower than in grand prix qualifying.
That represents an uncharacteristically poor trend for Piastri, who has usually been able to pull himself level with, or ahead of, Norris on weekends that have started slowly. This has not been the case at the Circuit of the Americas, which was also a poor track for Piastri in 2024.
When asked by The Race what he was battling in the car this weekend, Piastri said it was “just getting into the rhythm” - a sentiment echoed by McLaren team principal Andrea Stella - on a bumpy track with a mix of big braking zones and high speed corners.
“You need a lot of confidence and there's a lot of corners to make you pay for it if you don't have that feeling,” Piastri said.
“I feel like yesterday [Friday] there were a few relatively clear opportunities to try and find, but today [Saturday] it felt like my laps were maybe not the best laps of my life.”
Piastri felt he was losing “a little bit in a lot of places really” although going into his final run in qualifying the biggest losses were braking for Turn 1, the bumpy but fast Turn 6 right-hander at the end of the opening sector, and the tight Turn 11 hairpin.
There were signs he was not confident on the brakes, struggled to commit over the bumps, and had difficulty getting the front of the car to turn into slower corners like Turn 11 and Turn 15.
This probably played into something both drivers observed in McLaren’s debrief that the laptime here seemed to be derived by taking the car to the limit of locking all four brakes - and a lack of confidence would prohibit this at great cost.
“If you just drive too gently because you can't cope with a wind gust, or you just want to have a prudent approach to driving, you're not going to generate laptime,” Stella said of what his drivers fed back.
“So you sort of have to lean on to the limit, and if you lean on to the limit, you need to have a certain rhythm and a certain confidence.
“If anything is this aspect that is missing on Oscar's side.”
It may be that this demand of the COTA track brought out one of the MCL39’s underlying evils – a tricky front axle that does not always give drivers the best feeling. Piastri has tended to deal with this better than Norris in 2025 but has not been immune to it and said “the kind of behaviour that we've had a couple of times through the season came out to play again today”.
Norris uses a slightly different front suspension configuration to Piastri that is aimed at giving better feeling to mitigate that limitation, and while it has not been something Piastri has been bothered about trying, it could be helping Norris handle the specific challenge of this circuit slightly better.
However, it is also the case that Norris has been on the front foot from the first session, whereas Piastri has not been comfortable - and has not had the usual opportunities to catch up.
This being a sprint weekend means only one practice session and the first-corner crash in the sprint deprived Piastri of further learning that, given his struggles, would have been more valuable to him than Norris.
With the sharp end of the grid being so tight, the result is Piastri not just trailing Norris and outside championship rival and poleman Max Verstappen, but falling behind both Ferraris and George Russell’s Mercedes.
That means Piastri faces a mission in damage limitation on Sunday as he bids to retain control of a championship battle that is becoming more wide open again.
