Piastri, Stella see signs of evolution in McLaren Baku turnaround

McLaren principal Andrea Stella said Oscar Piastri’s third-place qualifying result shows the Australian is getting to grips with the 2026 car, though he admitted that Lando Norris’s afternoon was hamstrung by engine problems.

Piastri came within 0.001s of deposing Baku specialist Charles Leclerc for a spot on the front row alongside runaway pole-getter George Russell in a wild reversal of fortune following a scrappy practice day.

Not only had McLaren been well off the pace on Thursday in Azerbaijan, but it had also experienced problems with its sweeping upgrade package, with the team having to cable-tie together some new parts to get them to the end of the day.

Things looked barely improved in FP3, but Piastri said the car came to him on low fuel in qualifying, allowing him to equal his best qualifying result of the season.

“It’s been not an easy weekend for sure, from a few areas,” he said. “We’ve not been particularly quick. We’re also running cable ties on our car through [practice], which is never a great sign.

“But it’s not the first time this year that we get to qualifying, we take all the fuel out and the car just comes alive more.

“I’m happy with how we’ve tried to evolve this weekend. It’s certainly not been easy to get the most out of this car around here with how much you have to push and, obviously, the consequences, so to end up P3 is a really good result.”

Stella said it was a positive sign that Piastri was learning to adapt his driving style to the demands of 2026 machinery.

“He certainly has made some adaptations from a technical point of view,” he said.

“But above all I think Oscar is also just adapting to his mindset. Oscar, when he’s fast, his data is very clean — it’s like he finds a way of driving the car that is fast but in a way is also nice.

“It looks like you can’t be too nice with the cars, or at least with the McLaren, with the current regulations.

“Hopefully we will keep developing the car and make it just faster and a little bit more driver-friendly.”

Piastri’s performance meant he outqualified teammate Norris for just the second time in the last nine grands prix, lapping 0.308s quicker than the reigning champion.

Norris, however, revealed afterwards that he had been suffering from a lack of straight-line speed that left him fighting with one hand tied behind his back, suggesting that the desire to compensate for the missing performance is what drove him to overcommit at Turn 3, where he ran off the road and lost his final qualifying attempt.

Stella said the team already had suspicions about the cause.

“On Lando’s side specifically, we observe a deficit of power that we are investigating,” he said. “It seems to be linked to some behavior of the fuel injection, something that hopefully we will be able to — or the adaptive systems should be able to — improve for tomorrow.

“It looks like occasionally the power unit generates a bit less power, but this is a specific phenomenon, a specific issue. It has nothing to do with the overall behavior of the power unit.”

Stella also admitted that McLaren was still struggling generally to match the works Mercedes team for straight-line speed despite sharing the same engine.

“In a circuit like this, we have seen in every practice session and then in qualifying that we were losing time in the straight compared to Mercedes GP,” he said.

“I think it’s fair to say that their package, chassis, [gear] ratios, power unit — it just seems to be more effective when it comes to generating top speed.

“I think we saw how strong they were in Monza — pretty much every long straight in the championship they were able to generate more speed.

“It would be incorrect from an engineering point of view to say that there’s a difference in power unit or they use the power unit a little bit better, because in fact we don’t know, and we’re not assuming that there’s any difference.

“It’s the package that is more effective for them. They might have even less aerodynamic drag — we know that drag is an area that we need to keep working on.

“We take it as a fact, as an opportunity to do better.”