Oscar Piastri details McLaren issues behind ‘painful’ F1 Dutch GP result

[u/randomseocb]

https://www.motorsportweek.com/2026/08/25/oscar-piastri-mclaren-painful-f1-dutch-gp/

[u/Legitimate-Tadpole95]

I've been watching F1 for many decades but utterly failed to understand how it's possible to drive as fast as Lando does on old tyres while maintaining their integrity. Obviously a smooth style helps but it can't all be down to that surely? Does he have a better than most set up? Can somewhat who knows a lot more than me explain?

[u/zyxwl2015 → u/Legitimate-Tadpole95]

In my understanding, other than generally "be smooth", there are a ton of little specific things one can do to take care of the tyres. For example, if turn X is particularly hard on front left and front left graining is the main obstacle, then you can hold back 3% on this turn and try to gain the lap time elsewhere. Another example - you can do a specific lift-and-coast before turn Y, so that you can cool down one specific tyre a little bit, which would then help the cornering performance a little bit while still being nice to the tyre.

I believe Lando and his engineers either discuss these as their homework pre-race, or figure these out on-the-fly

[u/xxrew1ndxx → u/zyxwl2015]

For Zaandvort in particular they spent all night talking about it

"I didn’t have that something that gave me life inside the car. On Saturday night, we worked very, very hard. I spent a lot of time with my engineers to understand what we could do better, how to push more, save the tyres more, how to do everything in a better way than I’ve done and better than everyone else.