Piastri did not believe McLaren could add significantly

The British Grand Prix was only Oscar Piastri’s tenth race in Formula One and he finished 4th in it, although his previous best result was 8th in Australia. On the rest of the tracks, the McLaren driver was outside the top ten and only in Monaco did he finish tenth.

According to him, he no longer believed that the team would be able to increase the speed of the car, but after receiving the improved MCL60 at Silverstone, he showed 3rd result in qualifying and in the race for the first time, although he lost two ran -third of the distance in the top three, he still couldn’t climb the podium because the safety car came on track in front of him at an unfortunate moment.

When Piastri was asked if he believed in the likelihood of such a sharp rise in results, the Australian replied in the negative.

“No, of course not. At the beginning of the year we performed very unstable, the results depended heavily on the configuration of the track, the properties of the asphalt and other factors,” said Oscar. “Now, thanks to this series of updates, we managed to improve significantly in one fast lap, but the most encouraging thing is that we added great on Sunday.

Even when the car was in its previous configuration and the conditions were good, it showed excellent speeds in qualifying, but on Sunday we always rolled back.

At Silverstone we were fast on Sunday and Saturday, which is really cool, so we have to give a full credit to the team for helping them upgrade the car and turn the tide of the season.

I’m sure there are tracks waiting for us where problems are possible, but I hope this just means it will be difficult for us to fight with Mercedes and Ferrari, and not fight because we are not in the last positions stand, as it happened sometimes during the season.”

The third part of the update package will be presented by McLaren in Hungary and Piastri hopes that he and Lando Norris can claim a good result at this circuit, even though the Hungaroring setup is very different from the Red Bull Ring and Silverstone.

“We were probably a little concerned that Lando’s result in Austria was a one-off and that we would be a bit slower at Silverstone,” continued the Australian. “But we went even faster there and that was great. The British circuit with all its fast corners suits our car well. There are a lot of mid-speed corners in Budapest so we’ll see how we handle them, but we proved in two rounds in a row that it’s not all about luck.

I don’t know if our car will be the second fastest in Hungary, but we will certainly try to rise to high positions and set ourselves such a target.”