How Oscar Piastri plans to plug his F1 deficit to McLaren team-mate Lando Norris

Oscar Piastri says he is planning to experiment in his bid to plug the performance gap to his McLaren Formula 1 team-mate Lando Norris. 

Norris has won the last two grands prix while Piastri has struggled to match his team-mate, finishing more than half a minute adrift of the Briton as he took a distant sixth at the Dutch Grand Prix. 

Piastri has consistently been outperformed by Norris this season and finds himself 55 points and three places behind his team-mate in the championship standings. 

It has now been a year since Piastri, who for a long time looked the favourite to win a maiden F1 world title last season, last won a race. 

The Australian’s latest struggles at Zandvoort prompted a deep dive to try to get to the bottom of what is going wrong for him. 

Asked ahead of the Italian Grand Prix if he has found any answers, Piastri replied: “Yes I think we have, but it's not kind of one problem that keeps recurring. Every race is facing something a little bit different. 

“We need to try and find the big picture for myself and and the team around me. But I think the positive from Zandvoort was that the qualifying at least was significantly better and closer to the level it should be at. 

“The process that we go through is then trying to translate that into the race, and of course Zandvoort was challenging. So the main focus now is doing some experimentation to find some things that will make us quicker. But I'm confident that we're finding the right answers, and can find a way.” 

One theory is that the engine regulations for this season have potentially limited Piastri’s previous strength in high-speed corners, while the more on-the-edge style of the 2026 cars have exacerbated his struggles in low-grip conditions, which were exposed towards the end of last year. 

But Piastri is clear it is not just one problem hampering him. 

“It's not as straightforward as just, ‘Oh, I'll brake a bit earlier’. This year in particular, how I actually like to drive the car is not necessarily the best way to drive these cars,” he explained. 

"Sometimes it happens, sometimes not, and I think that's why it’s a challenge because it's not been the same issue that we've run into every time. 

“For me it's just about trying to find that right direction, the things that make this car work. At points I’ve been able to find it, and at other points we've tried a lot and not been able to find it. 

“So it’s not as simple as that but when you're comfortable in the car, everything becomes a lot easier. It’s very easy to have a spiral in both directions. A positive spiral where things are comfortable, you've got more capacity to think about it, and then you can run a bit more subconscious, and it just becomes easier. 

“Then if you’re uncomfortable, you're thinking about it a lot more and you're not driving on instinct anymore. That’s why it can quite quickly unravel. I don't think we're at that point by any means, but it's certainly not come particularly easily so far in finding solutions for it.

“We will find solutions eventually but it’s more about how we can make things a bit quicker and adapt a bit quicker through the weekend. But there’s a lot of various things. It's not as simple as as "I struggle with this one thing." It's a lot of things combined.”