Stella: After Miami, Piastri’s confidence only grew stronger

Oscar Piastri started the Miami Grand Prix with confidence, already in the first laps he climbed to 2nd position and after Max Verstappen’s pit stop he even took the lead at one point. However, the Australian McLaren driver was unlucky when the safety car came onto the track due to an accident between Kevin Magnussen and Logan Sargent, shortly after Piastri had pitted and switched to hard tyres.

But then Oscar’s car was damaged while battling Carlos Sainz for fourth position, and he had to make an unscheduled pit stop to replace the nose cone. As a result, Piastri missed the opportunity to earn points and finished only 13th.

The race was won by Lando Norris, who was much luckier: he stayed on track longer than Piastri, cleverly working on the tyres, was able to wait for the safety car to come out, after which he pitted and remained first. position at the restart and showed excellent pace in the second segment of the race. However, his MCL38 was equipped with a full suite of technical innovations prepared by McLaren for the Miami round, while Oscar received only half of these updates.

However, Woking team leader Andrea Stella drew attention to the fact that Piastri was ahead of his teammate in sprint qualifying and was generally on par with Norris in terms of speed throughout the weekend.

“After Miami, Oscar is even more aware of his strengths,” says Stella. “You could say we already knew how fast he could be in one lap. Since he did not receive the full range of new products, I must emphasize that the size of his lead over Lando in the main qualifying weekend was smaller than the speed difference due to differences in the versions of their cars.

And he was able to show good speed in one fast lap in very difficult conditions, as all drivers struggled with soft tires. He also performed very confidently in the race. By the way, this was also noticed by Lando, who said that when he saw Oscar overtaking the Ferrari, he thought everything was fine with our pace.

And Oscar showed really good pace in the first part of the distance. Overall, his confidence in his abilities only grew stronger after Miami. This is primarily down to race pace, as after the stages in Japan and China we wanted him to improve in this area. In my opinion, Piastri is now flying with a lot of confidence.”