Piastri: McLaren Still Can't Win on Pure Pace

Oscar Piastri says McLaren has moved closer to Mercedes after its recent upgrades, but not far enough to win races on outright pace after the opening five rounds of the season.

The McLaren driver said the development steps introduced in Miami and Canada have brought progress, yet the competitive order has not changed. “We’ve got some homework to do on how to make the car even quicker,” Piastri told media including RacingNews365. “Mercedes were definitely still ahead, we could get close, and it was a similar picture to Miami.”

That left Piastri clear about where McLaren stands. “We’re definitely not in a position to be winning races on merit, but we’re not too far off,” he said.

Canada, though, also underlined how narrow McLaren’s margin still is. Piastri described it as “a positive weekend in a few different areas” and said he had made “some good progress compared to Miami on a few things,” even if the result was “maybe not very spectacular.” But the race exposed the team’s fragility when both McLaren drivers started on intermediates on a drying track, a call that cost track position after what he said had been a strong start from the grid.

Piastri said that mistake made it harder to turn encouraging pace into a result, even on a weekend where he felt the car had taken steps forward. His view was that McLaren can stay in the fight if it holds position, but it still lacks the underlying speed to control races against Mercedes.

That matters in the standings as much as on track. McLaren sits third in the constructors’ championship after five races, behind both Mercedes and Ferrari, with Ferrari 41 points ahead and Mercedes 113 clear. For a team that has brought major upgrade packages in successive events, Piastri’s verdict was that progress is real, but it now has to become results quickly if McLaren is to stop losing ground to the teams ahead.