The Australian was asked whether the AI that learns each circuit and decides when to deploy the electrical portion of the 2026 power unit had left him feeling like a spectator in his own cockpit.
“Sometimes, yes,” Piastri told reporters.
A car that halves its own power
The 2026 regulations split power almost evenly between combustion and electrical energy, and hand deployment decisions to algorithms that adapt through the weekend as they map each circuit. On long-straight tracks the split leaves drivers running on the internal combustion engine for large stretches once the batteries are drained.
“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,” Piastri said.
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He pointed to Spa specifically.
“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.”
Long straights are the worst offenders. Shorter circuits such as Zandvoort and the Hungaroring, Piastri believes, mask the problem because there is no room for the software’s decisions to matter as much.
Nine hundredths, four positions, none of it in the driver’s hands
The gap between the front-runners in 2026 is being decided by lines of code as much as by cornering.
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“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.”
Piastri’s teammate Lando Norris, the reigning world champion, put it more starkly at Spa in July.
“It’s not down to the driver. It’s just down to hoping you get lucky that the power unit does what it should do and doesn’t do something silly.”
At Spa, Piastri was harsher still.
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“When you’ve got qualifying grids decided by computers behaving or misbehaving, it’s a pretty crap way of going racing.”
The engines respond to anything a driver does earlier in the lap. As Piastri put it in the summer, “the engines are so complicated, they are sensitive to everything. Even things you do on an out-lap can dictate what happens.”
Mercedes has cracked what nobody else has
Kimi Antonelli leads the drivers’ championship on 292 points, 81 clear of teammate George Russell on 211, with Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari a further 20 back on 191 after 13 of 24 rounds. Ten of the season’s race wins have gone to Mercedes. In the constructors’ standings, Mercedes leads Ferrari by 145 points, with McLaren third and Red Bull fourth on 230.
Piastri has yet to win in 2026. He is at the Baku street circuit next, where the Azerbaijan Grand Prix has been moved to Saturday 26 September, one day earlier than usual because 27 September is Azerbaijan’s Remembrance Day.
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