Piastri admits McLaren has 'no real strengths' as rivals close in on both titles

Oscar Piastri has delivered a frank assessment of McLaren’s 2025 campaign, admitting the MCL40 currently has “no clear strengths” against Ferrari and Mercedes and that the Woking outfit is relying on opportunism rather than outright pace to stay in championship contention.

The Australian’s comments come after a difficult run of results that has put both the constructors’ and drivers’ titles under serious threat. Races in Monaco and Montreal laid bare McLaren’s weakness in low and medium-speed corners, while Lando Norris’s podium in Barcelona owed much to Kimi Antonelli’s late retirement rather than the car’s underlying competitiveness.

“It’s very up and down, clearly — I think probably a bit more down than it has been up, unfortunately,” Piastri said. “There’s been glimpses of good pace, there’s been races where we’ve taken advantage of the situations around us and maximised things. There’s also been plenty of moments where we haven’t, whether it be through mistakes from drivers, whether it be reliability issues.”

Piastri was candid about the car’s all-round deficit. “We have a bit of a deficit everywhere. We don’t really have any clear strengths, but we’re not terribly bad anywhere either. In some ways that’s good, in some ways that’s bad.”

Team principal Andrea Stella has already acknowledged that low and medium-speed performance is short of the mark, and Piastri echoed that view, insisting upgrades are now essential. “To catch Mercedes — and we’ll see whether Ferrari maintain their form — we need to put some new bits on the car. We need to make it faster and we need to do it quicker than everyone else, because at this point in the year everybody’s coming with upgrades quickly.”

Piastri also reflected on his own Barcelona race, where he finished fifth, 35 seconds behind team-mate Norris and behind Max Verstappen. He said he now understood the personal issues that hampered him that afternoon and was confident they would not recur.

Looking ahead to Austria, Piastri tempered expectations, pointing to Ferrari’s Barcelona upgrade package and an incoming performance step from Red Bull as factors that could further complicate McLaren’s position before its own updates arrive.