Oscar Piastri walked into one of the paddock’s liveliest arguments at Circuit of the Americas and took a side.

Speaking at the drivers’ press conference ahead of the United States Grand Prix, the McLaren driver told reporters that Red Bull had become “the most consistently quick car” in Formula 1 over the recent stretch of races.

“I think Red Bull definitely took a pretty big step forwards over the last triple-header,” Piastri said, adding that whatever upgrades the team brought to Baku had worked.

Max Verstappen has won the two races since those Baku upgrades, in Malaysia and Singapore.

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Hadjar had argued the opposite

Red Bull’s own Isack Hadjar had just rejected the idea that Red Bull has F1’s fastest car, arguing that a Ferrari in Verstappen’s hands would have won Singapore by a bigger margin.

“No. I don’t think we have the fastest car. I think the car is still very hard to drive,” Hadjar told the same press conference.

Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton were among those who pushed back on the Red Bull driver’s framing of the Singapore race.

Ferrari strong in the corners, undone on the straights

Piastri’s own read of the Ferrari was more granular. He described a car that dominates where the drivers brake and turn and that falls off wherever the engines open up.

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“They’re either joint quickest or outright quickest in basically every corner this year, but they lose on all the straights,” he told reporters in Austin, admitting he could not say whether the straight-line deficit came “from drag, from power, I don’t know.”

The Australian added that the paddock had expected Ferrari to be the benchmark in Singapore, a circuit built almost entirely from slow and medium-speed corners. Verstappen won anyway.

Where the title fight sits

Behind the pace argument, the standings tell their own story. Kimi Antonelli leads the drivers’ championship on 340 points, 102 clear of Mercedes team-mate George Russell, with six rounds left. Verstappen is fourth on 221, with Piastri seventh on 138.

In the constructors’ table, McLaren are third on 339 points, 7 ahead of Red Bull and 134 behind runaway leaders Mercedes.

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Piastri, for his part, declined to name a single rival. The challenges, he said, were “kind of rotating” from one weekend to the next.

Lights out at Circuit of the Americas is scheduled for 3pm local time on Sunday, 25 October.

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