Formula 1’s recent rule changes have done little to improve racing quality or safety, said Oscar Piastri after the Miami Grand Prix.
Last weekend marked the championship’s first races since a package of rule adjustments was introduced following concerns raised after the opening rounds. Those changes aimed to address issues drivers highlighted, including the high closing speeds between cars that contributed to Oliver Bearman’s crash at Suzuka, and worries about cars’ qualifying performance.
Piastri, who missed the starts at the opening two grands prix and saw little close racing at Suzuka after taking the lead at the start, said Sunday’s race in Miami demonstrated the reforms have only modest impact.
“The reduced harvest limit in qualifying has helped a bit,” he said. “It hasn’t fixed all the problems, but it’s helped with one.”
He added that the races themselves felt largely unchanged. “The races are basically exactly the same and I think today was my first proper experience of overtaking people and then having to defend and stuff like that. It’s pretty crazy, to be honest.”
Piastri and George Russell repeatedly traded places as fluctuations in energy harvesting, deployment and the use of Overtake Mode altered each car’s performance. Piastri described the battle as feeling “random” and warned that closing speeds remain extremely high.
“At one point George was one second behind me and managed to overtake me by the end of that straight,” he said. “It’s just a bit random.”
He explained how those extreme closing speeds make defending very difficult. “The closing speeds are huge and trying to anticipate that as the defending driver is incredibly tough to do. Obviously for the overtaking driver, I wasn’t that pleased with one of the moves that George did, but I kind of found myself almost doing the same move about five laps later, just because the closing speed is enormous. So from that side of things, not much has really changed.”
The McLaren driver suggested there are limits to what can be achieved with incremental modifications to the current regulations.
“I think the collaboration from the FIA and F1 has been good, but there’s only so many things you can change with the hardware we have. So some changes in the future are I think still needed for sure. How quickly we can do it is the big question.”
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