The Australian hasn’t started a single race this season, but that didn’t stop him from sharing his opinion. Piastri called the new power units extremely complex and warned that any change teams make brings consequences they often can’t anticipate.
Piastri’s season got off to a forgettable start. In Australia, he crashed on the formation lap and didn’t even get to take the start. In China, a power unit issue left him out before the race even started. Now in Japan, he hopes to get back on track normally, but his frustration with how the technical side of the regulations is handled became clear when he spoke to the media.
“They’re incredibly complex,” Piastri said about the current engines. The McLaren driver explained that there are so many rules surrounding the power units that when you change something, an unexpected effect appears somewhere else. On a circuit like Shanghai, for example, you can regenerate quite a bit of battery, but on other tracks the equation changes and you can’t always recover all the energy you want.
What bothers the Australian most is the lack of room for the driver to do something when things don’t go as expected. Piastri said that if they want to change something in the setup, they can’t because it needs to be programmed or it involves modifying the engine code, so from the seat you just have to learn and adapt to what the car allows.
McLaren uses Mercedes’ power unit, the same engine that has won the first two races of the season and has the German team comfortably leading the championship. But that doesn’t guarantee anything for Piastri, because reliability let him down in China and the complexity of the system means finding solutions isn’t as simple as in previous years.
The Australian isn’t the only driver complaining about the new technical regulations. Max Verstappen has been criticizing since before the start of the season how cars depend more on energy management than driver skill. Lando Norris also joined the criticism after the issues his team had in the first races. What started as an isolated complaint seems to be becoming widespread frustration within the paddock.
Piastri knows his team has a competitive car and that with a bit of luck he could be fighting further up, but he also understands that in today’s Formula 1, luck isn’t enough if the engine doesn’t respond as it should. That’s why he asked for more clarity in a system he considers too complicated for what should be the top category of motorsport.
The Japanese Grand Prix will be the third round of the calendar and the last before the April break. Piastri wants to leave behind the ghosts of Australia and China to focus on scoring the points that have slipped away from him so far. But before getting in the car, he left a clear message: the engines of this new era are a headache, and drivers have their hands tied when something goes wrong.