McLaren explains how Oscar Piastri has improved to become 2025 F1 title contender

Oscar Piastri has demonstrated improved tyre management sensibilities so far over 2025’s Formula 1 season, which McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says is testament to the Australian’s work with the team’s engineers.

One of the criticisms levelled at Piastri in his first two F1 seasons, with regards to his gap to Lando Norris, was that his style appeared to take more life out of the Pirelli tyres – and thus would start to decline over the course of a stint.

However, Piastri has shown a much stronger approach to this over 2025; over a stint, he has been often level on pace with Norris, sometimes even transcending the lap times of his more experienced team-mate.

Stella believes that Piastri, now in his third season, is starting to “master” the requirements of the tyre during a race. Although it could be assumed that the light touch that this year’s McLaren has applied on the tyres has helped Piastri, the Italian does not believe this is the whole picture.

Instead, Stella explained the mechanisms at play, and the work that the championship leader has done to build up his skills in that area.

“Looking at the way Oscar is mastering and managing tyre degradation at the moment, no way that this improvement would come simply from the car,” he said.

“The only way to exploit the improvements we have made with the car – they take place only when the driver somehow understands what to do with the tyres and with the car.

Oscar Piastri, McLaren

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

“This has happened not by chance, or not because Oscar is getting a little older; this is because there’s been a lot of work done by the engineers in terms of understanding the driving style, how you damage the tyres, how you can prevent damaging the tyres.

“This is very different from when you have graining, when you have graining at the front, graining at the rear, overheating of the front, overheating at the rear, it’s not like you improve the way you master the tyres in a way that is good for all seasons, there’s many ways in which you need to be able to do so.

“Like I say, I think this is testament to the quality of the work done by Oscar and the team around him.”

Stella also believes that Norris has also furthered his improvement in this area, noting the Briton’s slight edge in performance towards the end of the Miami Grand Prix in their respective hard-tyre stints.

Norris enjoyed much more pace on the hards and started to scythe away at Piastri’s advantage, although the Australian picked up the pace in the final three laps to seal the victory.

“Even from Lando’s point of view. I think we have seen that there’s definitely improvements, and if anything in the final stint on the hard tyres I could see that at times Lando was, if anything, even a little faster than Oscar.

“For Lando there was just too much time lost in the two situations with Verstappen to have what could have been an interesting situation between our two drivers.

“But I’m sure it will come in the future races.”