- Oscar Piastri admitted that F1’s new AI-controlled energy deployment system sometimes leaves him feeling “like a passenger” in his own car, unable to control when full power arrives.
- The McLaren driver said the problem was worst at Spa, where drivers lost half their power mid-straight and tiny code differences separated four cars by less than a tenth of a second.
- Baku’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix this weekend features the longest straight of the season, over 2,200 meters, setting up what Piastri expects to be the system’s toughest test yet.
“Sometimes, yes”: a title contender admits he isn’t fully driving his own car
Somebody asked Oscar Piastri, directly, whether he felt like a passenger in his own Formula 1 car. Not a metaphor. Not a complaint about strategy or a rival team. A straight question about whether the 25-year-old McLaren driver, one of the sport’s fastest, really feels like a passenger when the lights go out.
“Sometimes, yes,” Piastri replied.
It is a striking admission from a driver built on precision and control, and it points to the defining technical story of the 2026 Formula 1 season: an AI algorithm, not the driver’s right foot, now decides much of when a car’s electrical power arrives.
Half the power, and none of the say in when it shows up
Under the 2026 regulations, drivers are not fully responsible for deploying their 350kW of electrical energy. That job now belongs to an algorithm that learns each circuit across a race weekend and calculates, on paper, the ideal deployment strategy for every corner and straight. The split between combustion power and battery power shifted from roughly 80:20 in favor of the engine last year to an even 50:50 this season, a change that has divided the paddock all year and earned a nickname among frustrated drivers: yo-yo racing.
Piastri laid out exactly what that feels like from the cockpit. “The principle of driving a race car that loses effectively half of its power before the end of the straight is hard to get your head around sometimes,” he said. “Even in Spa, a lot of the middle sector we were doing it just on the combustion engine, with no battery assistance at all, which is a weird feeling in itself, having some corners with a certain amount of power and others with full power.”
Spa-Francorchamps, with its long straights and heavy braking zones, exposed the system at its most unpredictable. “I think Spa was particularly frustrating, not just for me but for quite a lot of others, because those small differences in the code and what the engines did made quite a big difference in lap time,” Piastri said. “Especially at the front of the field, I think there were still only nine hundredths or something separating four positions, and there were definitely more than nine hundredths on the table for quite a few drivers from things they could not control.”
Not every track punishes drivers equally
Piastri was careful to note the issue is not universal. Circuits with shorter straights barely expose the quirks in the system at all. “At the Hungaroring or Zandvoort, I really don’t expect there to be many problems at all with that kind of thing, because the straights are so much shorter, so even if there are differences, they should be a lot less.” It is the long, fast circuits, Spa, Silverstone, and now Baku, where the algorithm has the most room to behave unpredictably from lap to lap.
That distinction counts for a great deal this week. Formula 1 heads to the Azerbaijan Grand Prix with a main straight stretching more than 2,200 meters, the longest of the entire 2026 calendar. If Spa’s mid-length straights were enough to separate four cars by under a tenth of a second on factors outside the drivers’ control, Baku’s marathon front straight is set up to magnify the effect considerably.
Piastri is not alone in his frustration. Max Verstappen and Lando Norris, Piastri’s own teammate and the reigning world champion, have both voiced their disapproval of the energy deployment rules across the season, part of a broader grumble that has followed the new power unit regulations from preseason testing onward.
A tougher year than the results alone suggest
The AI deployment system is not the only technical fight Piastri has been having in 2026. McLaren team principal Andrea Stella recently confirmed the team is shifting additional engineering resources specifically to Piastri’s side of the garage, describing the core of his struggles this season as “purely technical” rather than anything to do with confidence or driving errors.
That is a notable vote of confidence from a team principal, but it also underlines how strange a season it has been for a driver who spent 2025 among the sport’s most consistent frontrunners. Piastri now shares a garage with Norris, who enters the closing stretch of 2026 defending the world title he won a year ago, while his teammate works through a car that, by his own description, sometimes drives itself through the very moments that decide a lap.
Piastri did not present any of this as an excuse so much as an explanation, one delivered with the same measured tone he is known for in the paddock. He was not asking for sympathy. He was describing, in plain terms, what it is like to race at 200 miles per hour with an algorithm making some of the decisions a driver used to make alone.
It is a strange position for a driver who arrived in Formula 1 with a reputation built on data literacy and cold, analytical racecraft, the kind of driver who was supposed to thrive as the sport leaned harder into complex software and simulation tools. Instead, the system that was meant to reward precision has, on his own account, introduced a layer of randomness that no amount of preparation can fully remove. Piastri has talked openly this year about adjusting his driving style race to race, sometimes lifting earlier than instinct tells him to, sometimes trusting a deployment map he cannot see or influence mid-corner.
The comparison to his teammate only sharpens the point. Norris has had his own complaints about the deployment rules, but he arrives at Baku defending a world championship, while Piastri arrives trying to stop the gap between them from growing further. Both drivers are racing the same software on the same chassis, which makes Piastri’s public frustration less about excusing a slower car and more about flagging a variable that, in his words, takes real lap time away from drivers who have no way to claw it back through skill alone.
Baku as the next data point
The Azerbaijan Grand Prix runs Thursday, September 24 through Saturday, September 26, with the race itself held a day earlier than usual on the calendar. For Piastri and every other driver managing the 2026 power unit, it doubles as a live test of exactly the scenario he flagged after Belgium: a long straight, a system still learning the track in real time, and a lap time that could swing on code rather than throttle input.
Whether Formula 1’s governing body adjusts the deployment rules before 2027 remains an open question. For now, Piastri and the rest of the grid are left racing a system as much as they are racing each other, hoping the algorithm learns Baku’s 2,200-meter straight quickly enough to let the drivers, for once, decide how the lap ends.
McLaren’s constructors’ title defense hangs partly on the answer. A team built around two drivers taking points off each other and everyone else needs both cars performing near their ceiling, and Piastri’s public accounting of exactly where his lap time goes missing is as much a message to his own engineers as it is to the wider paddock. Stella’s decision to reroute resources toward Piastri’s car suggests the team has already reached the same conclusion Piastri reached out loud: whatever is costing him time at Spa and Silverstone is not going to fix itself between now and Baku.
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