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Having made his F1 debut last year, McLaren driver Oscar Piastri insists that he is delighted with the improvements he has made regarding tyre management.
Following a battle between Alpine and McLaren for his services, Oscar Piastri landed at the Woking-based outfit, making his F1 debut at the start of last season.
The Melbourne-born driver won Formula One’s two main feeder series, the F2 and the F3 championships in his debut year, mimicking the achievements of Charles Leclerc and George Russell.
Looking back on his first season and a half in Formula 1, he says: “I am happy with the way I am developing. I think it has gone about at the pace I had hoped for and what I expected. I’m pretty happy with it. But there were more things I had to work on than I expected beforehand.”
Although Piastri was able to mimic the same speed as his team-mate Lando Norris in several qualifying sessions last year, he often struggled to manage his tyres in races, particularly where degradation was significant.
The Australian secured his maiden victory at this year’s Hungarian Grand Prix where the extremely high track temperatures made tyre management tough.
Speaking of his improvements, Piastri noted: “I feel like that’s really taken a big step forward. We’re now into the final details of trying to perfect that rather than take a big step with that. That’s probably been the biggest area. Being a bit more consistent is still something I want to improve, which has been more with qualifying this year, to be honest, rather than anything,” Piastri said.
The one-time F1 race winner claims that the condensed nature of the F1 calendar was another difficulty which he had to learn to cope with.
“The biggest thing has been doing it every week. I think there have been some weekends where I’ve not been on the same level. But I also think there have been some weekends where I’ve been very strong.
“Last year, there were more weekends, especially in the race, where I needed to find a step to be able to go with Lando. I feel like this year, a lot more of the time, not all the time, I’ve been able to go with him and on some occasions be a little bit quicker. But just doing it every single weekend is kind of the difficult part.”
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