Piastri explains McLaren lessons from disastrous Chinese GP

Oscar Piastri believes that McLaren has taken plenty of lessons from the Chinese Grand Prix, despite failing to start Sunday’s race with either car.

Ahead of McLaren’s reunion with Honda in 2015, former boss Ron Dennis famously stated that customer teams could not win world titles. This came as F1 entered the turbo-hybrid era, and Mercedes began its dominance.

Flash forward just over a decade, and similar stories could be written, as last year’s champions, McLaren, are playing catch-up to Mercedes on how best to use the German marque’s power unit.

Despite a difficult weekend in China, however, Piastri believes that progress is being made.

“I think they’re just incredibly complex, and there’s so many rules on the power units that you sometimes change one thing and it has a very unintended consequence somewhere else,” he explained.

“At a circuit like this, it’s very harvest-rich, so you don’t really have a problem with super-clipping or needing to lift and coast, but you’ve got other problems, because you can’t harvest as much as you want everywhere and there’s nothing you can do about that as a driver.

“I think we’re learning that the difficult part is, even if there’s something that we know that we want to do differently, we can’t do anything, because it has to be programmed in or there has to be a code change, so it’s complex.”

McLaren progress “encouraging”

McLaren has suffered the worst start to a constructors’ championship defence since Red Bull in 2014, a fact skewed by Daniel Ricciardo’s disqualification after finishing second at the Australia Grand Prix.

Having placed firmly behind Mercedes and Ferrari in Australia, McLaren sits on 18 points after two weekends, 80 off pace-setters Mercedes.

However, up to the failure to start on Sunday in China, McLaren appeared to have been making progress, with Piastri giving an upbeat assessment despite the outcome.

“I think it’s been encouraging from some angle,” he added. “I think we’ve done a better job of optimising the power unit; I think we’ve got more out of things on that side. But I think the gap has reduced a little bit, but it’s still big. 

"Whilst we’ve understood some areas, we’ve also understood we’ve got a lot of work to do in others.”