McLaren drill into what is required to make Oscar Piastri an F1 championship contender in 2025

Work carried out by McLaren and Oscar Piastri has helped identify areas the young Australian needs to improve as he heads into the 2025 Formula One season.

Piastri ended the 2024 season speaking about a need for greater consistency.

The Australian was out-qualified by teammate Lando Norris on 21 occasions last season, leading him to point to those performances as an area that needed attention.

That drew him to view qualifying as the main area of focus but analysis with the team has since revealed that it’s not the Saturday session specifically that he needs to focus on.

Instead, there are other elements that are contributing to his qualifying performances, with the onus therefore on improving those.

Qualifying is one area to improve for Piastri ahead of the 2025 F1 season. Picture: Bryn Lennon – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images

Piastri controls the Fox Cricket Rover during day three of the Boxing Test Match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Picture: Morgan Hancock – CA/Cricket Australia via Getty Images

That process has been a key part of Piastri’s workload after a much-needed summer break spent on home soil.

“For the first few weeks or first couple of weeks, it was pretty much just relax and not think about racing for a period of time, especially with the end to the season and kind of the scheduling of the end of the season,” Piastri admitted.

“That was a busy three and a half weeks if you include the test, so it was nice to just not think about racing for a bit and see my family because it’s the one time of the year I get to see them properly.

“In saying that, naturally we start thinking about race cars and racing and how to improve pretty quickly.

“But also for the team, and now with the winter shut down for the week, we obviously can’t do anything in that period of time.

“When you come back into the new year, then everyone has the time and hopefully the energy to go back into the details of what went well last year, what didn’t go so well.

“For me, in my experience, there’s not that much use in going through things without the evidence to kind of go alongside it.

“I think separating the break into two periods of relaxing and then how you’re going to go better this season, that comes a little bit later in the new year.”

That process has seen Piastri and the team drill down into the nuances of his 2024 season, which netted two race wins and helped McLaren seal its first constructors’ championship in 26 years.

Lando Norris, Piastri and the McLaren team celebrate winning the 2024 F1 Constructors Championship in Abu Dhabi. Picture: Joe Portlock/Getty Images

By doing so, a different picture began to emerge as to why the Australian struggled for pace on occasion.

“I think definitely there was a couple of weekends where I wasn’t as strong as I wanted to be,” Piastri said of his 2024 season.

“I think it’s building up the resilience to be able to adapt a bit quicker in the weekends.

“If the weekend started bad, in those weekends it was difficult, especially if it was a Sprint weekend, to then make the progress back towards the front.

“So I think we’ve gone into a lot of detail on how we can be better prepared for this season and some of the more specific driving opportunities.

“I said at the end of last season, qualifying is something I want to work on, but I think going through a lot of the details and things, it’s not just qualify better,” he added.

“There’s some specifics that, if I can improve on those, it’ll make everything better, and then you get the confidence and everything kind of naturally helps itself.

“So there’s definitely some opportunities we’ve identified and I think if I can work on those, then hopefully those weaker weekends at some points from last season will disappear.”

McLaren heads into the 2025 season as favourites following a strong end to the 2024 campaign.

Piastri and McLaren will be looking to capitalise on a strong finish to 2024. Picture: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images

However, the Woking-based operation is expected to have close competition from the likes of Red Bull, Ferrari, and Mercedes, making for potentially eight drivers capable of winning on any given weekend.

Against that level of competition, Piastri is aware that he can’t afford an off weekend.

“I think ultimately that’s going to be an important thing this season, is putting your best foot forward every weekend,” he reasoned.

“There’s going to be weekends where you’re not the quickest, that’s going to be for sure.

“It’s how you can still make the most of those weekends where you’re not on top.”

McLaren unveiled its 2025 car, the MCL39, at Silverstone last Thursday as part of a shakedown test, with a livery launch set to follow at the F1 75 Live event on London on Tuesday.

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Originally published as McLaren drill into what is required to make Oscar Piastri an F1 championship contender in 2025