The Spanish Grand Prix is notorious for being the perfect testing ground for Formula 1 cars and for years hosted pre-season events to help teams get up to speed.
Although the venue of pre-season testing has now changed to Bahrain, there was still a real expectation that the Spanish Grand Prix would give F1 fans an indication of the true pecking order of the grid after outlier races in Monaco and Canada.
Max Verstappen showed his exceptional talent by winning the race ahead of Lando Norris who arguably had the fastest car on the grid.
The British driver was on pole position but a poor start was all it took to hand the triple world champion the one opportunity he needed to earn his seventh Grand Prix victory of the campaign.
However, speaking on the RacingNews 365 Podcast, journalist Ian Parkes relayed his interaction with Norris’s McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri after the race.
The Australian added six points to his career tally of 184 in Spain but was well off the pace of Norris in both qualifying and the race itself.
Jolyon Palmer admitted that he thought Piastri has been slightly underwhelming recently.
And while he backs him to potentially be a future world champion, it was clear that the weekend didn’t go as planned for Piastri.
Oscar Piastri’s confidence at an all-time low during Spanish Grand Prix
Discussing the young Australian, Parkes said: “Right now, Oscar [Piastri] is going through a little bit of a similar thing [to Sergio Perez].
“Speaking to him in the pen, post-Grand Prix on Sunday in Barcelona, he said that in his Formula 1 career, which is only short, only a season and a half, that’s the least amount of confidence he has had in his McLaren.
“And that tells you something because here we are, as you say we’ve got two drivers in Lando [Norris] and Max [Verstappen], who are absolutely smashing it in their cars.
“And we’ve got two drivers, two teammates in Oscar and Checo, who have all of a sudden in Oscar’s case, really struggling for confidence.
“How they go about rediscovering that, that’s going to be a deep dive for the pair of them with their teams, but of course, it’s a very short period to deep dive because we’ve got Austria just around the corner and then immediately after that Silverstone.
“A huge amount to try and ascertain on both sides for those guys.”
Oscar Piastri looking to bounce back at the Austrian Grand Prix
After the race, Piastri admitted it was a ‘tough weekend’ and said to the official F1 website: “I think the race today was a positive to take away, but overall, a challenging few days in Spain.
“Obviously, Qualifying was the biggest frustration and made things very difficult going into the race.”
The frustration in qualifying was due to reaching Q3 but failing to set a time forcing him to start on the fifth row of the grid.
As Sergio Perez confirmed behind him, overtaking was very difficult in Spain with high tyre degradation to deal with – something Piastri hasn’t always dealt with well – and each of the top four teams converged to an extent where the individual talent of Verstappen and Norris made all the difference.
The Austrian Grand Prix marks the one-year anniversary of McLaren introducing a game-changing set of updates to Norris’s car and when Piastri was handed the same new parts at Silverstone he narrowly missed out on his first podium.
Although he finished 16 in Austria last year, it’s a track he’s previously won at in Formula 3 and he’ll once again have one of the fastest cars on the grid.
Qualifying has proved to be his strength in the past this season and he’ll want to make sure that the mistakes he made in Spain were a one-off rather than the beginning of a trend.
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