McLaren team principal Andrea Stella believes Oscar Piastri is accelerating in his development as a Formula 1 driver after they started working on what he describes as a ‘couple of opportunities’.
Piastri has shown improvements performances this year in race trim, bagging his first podium of the season in Monaco, and he drove a very strong race to P4 in Saudi Arabia.
Although he is 50 points behind Lando Norris, Andrea Stella is in good spirits and says the 23-year-old has stepped up his performance in recent events.
The Italian said it was during the China weekend that they discovered the opportunities for improvement on Piastri’s side of the garage.
Piastri struggled a lot with tyre degradation in Shanghai and was massively outpaced by Norris, even before the damage he picked up.
“After China, we looked at what we had learned in the first part of the season, together with Oscar’s engineers, and we found a couple of opportunities that we started to work on.
“And I have to say that they seem to be delivering an acceleration in Oscar’s development.
“There’s always underlying development, but in this case, both in terms of pure speed, which you can see in qualifying, and in terms of race craft, we have seen Oscar competing at a very high level.”
When asked specifically what happened in China that clicked and propelled Piastri forward, Stella said that it was the synergy between the driver and the engineers that made it work.
“That was a race in which tyre degradation and managing tyre degradation was important.
“We reviewed what was the objective entering the race in terms of managing tyres, how we executed, how we interacted with the driver during the race, and what should have been the contribution of the engineers, what should have been the realisation of the drivers.
“Those are the kind of things you review, and in all those aspects, we found ways of doing a better job altogether.
“That’s the kind of conversations you have with a driver to then try and move on, not only the driver, but also the engineering support.”
Piastri is in his second season in Formula 1. Stella added that a sense of familiarity is a key role in his development as a lot of the circuits he raced at last year were for the first time. He also made the jump to McLaren after spending his junior years as an Alpine one.
“Coming back to the same track is definitely important.
“There’s a sense of familiarity. There’s historical data. There are a lot of things that you review after year one.
“But in addition to that, it’s also that you have more races that you do in Formula 1, more races to work with your engineers, more races to just understand what you need to work on.
“So it’s not only the fact that you come to the same track for the second time, it’s just the overall journey of development, which I have to say for Oscar is quite impressive.”
