Why Oscar Piastri is fed up answering questions about his McLaren suspension set-up

Oscar Piastri is such a low-temperature customer that if, you imagine, he were to discover he had accidentally sat on a hand grenade, he would casually check that the pin was still in place before commenting with equal nonchalance on the carelessness of whoever left it there. Then, he would resume the business of the day with no further thought about the matter. 

But even Piastri’s enviable equanimity has come under pressure of late, owing to the deluge of questions regarding McLaren’s ‘new’ – but not actually new – front-suspension geometry and whether he plans to use it. 

Such lines of inquiry point to a fundamental misunderstanding of how F1 engineering works: rather than offering a linear performance uptick, new or different components may often just present an alternative solution to an existing problem and come with their own trade-offs. But the mainstream audience prefers a simpler narrative, one amply served up by the army of media commentators who like to point at a new component and pontificate about how many seconds it shaves off every lap. 

“I feel like this is like the fifth time I’ve explained it now, but it’s not an upgrade,” said Piastri with an eye roll and an audible sigh as he fielded the question for the umpteenth time during the Belgian Grand Prix weekend. 

“It’s just a different part. I’ve tried it in the sim. 

“But while we have other actual upgrades still coming through, I don’t… I want to get as clear of a read on that [other new components] as I can. It’s a very minor change, like I’ve said before. 

“It’s supposed to help in some ways, but it is… There are things that make… It makes certain things worse.” 

Piastri’s natural evasiveness in describing engineering nuances has of course served to heighten rather than dampen the intrigue. But the underlying message ought to be clear: this isn’t like the recent F1 movie, where swapping out the floor edges of the Apex GP car for more flamboyantly curved ones changes the entire aero map of the car and turns it from “shitbox” to frontrunner. 

McLaren’s ‘standard’ front suspension is already highly sophisticated in the way it combines strong anti-dive geometry – enabling the car to run at ultra-low ride heights beneficial to its ground-effect ecosystem – with aerodynamic profiles that help to keep front-tyre temperatures within the optimum range. The lower wishbone, decoupled where it meets the hub, is a work of art. 

Oscar Piastri, McLaren

Photo by: Steven Tee / LAT Images via Getty Images

But the ‘cost’ of this, at least as far as Piastri’s team-mate Lando Norris is concerned, is a lack of precise feel for what the front and rear ends are going to do next. Norris generally brakes later than Piastri and rides them further into the corner, while building steering angle, which naturally asks a little more of the front end and requires it to be communicative. 

That’s why, after he kept making small but costly errors at the beginning of the season, particularly in qualifying, Norris often talked about not “clicking” with the MCL 39. 

“I’m not able to do any of the laps like I was doing last season,” he said in Bahrain. “Then, I knew every single corner, everything that was going to happen with the car – how it was going to happen. 

“I felt on top of the car. This year, I could not have felt more opposite so far.” 

McLaren made an alternative front suspension design available to both drivers from the Canadian Grand Prix onwards, but only Norris took it. It’s understood that the design already existed but McLaren held it back because it considered the ‘standard’ geometry more optimal. 

Lando Norris, McLaren, Oscar Piastri, McLaren

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Formula 1 via Getty Images

Also, from Montreal onwards McLaren phased in a new front-end aerodynamic package in which a new front wing profile was just the most obvious element. As part of the package McLaren reshaped many other elements around the front wheels, including the brake ducts and the fairings around the hubs (the outer ‘drum’ is a standardised part, but the inner surfaces are adjustable). The fairings on the suspension arms were reprofiled, too. 

Regardless of what the self-appointed tech experts in the media would have you believe, these elements are designed to interact with one another to generate a fractional overall benefit, rather than functioning as individual bolt-on go-faster items. 

The sole visible difference in the alternative front suspension is the upper wishbone, which is thicker in cross-section where it meets the hub, suggesting a higher steering angle inclination – expressed as the angle of a line drawn between the upper and lower pivot points of the steering upright when viewed from straight-ahead. Among the side effects of increasing SAI is that the forces acting on the upper wishbone are greater. 

Higher SAI is associated with giving a clearer ‘feel’ through the steering because each stub axle begins to travel in a pronounced arc as the wheels are turned, displacing the car vertically. The apex of the arc is when the wheels are pointing straight ahead, giving a stronger self-centring action and naturally making the steering feel as if it is going light as the point of understeer approaches. 

Among the negatives of running higher SAI is that it tends to make the steering heavier, and increases positive camber on the outside wheel as the steering effort increases, impacting grip and tyre wear. It can also change the car’s responsiveness to bumps while steering effort is being applied. 

This is a compromise Norris is prepared to live with because it gives him the feel he was lacking. Piastri has decided the negatives outweigh the positives for him. 

“If it was as simple as being a benefit, then I would put it on and not ask any questions,” he said. “But that’s not the case.”