Piastri admits home win would be ‘really special’ but warns expecting similar form to last year is ‘optimistic’

Oscar Piastri has vowed to do his “absolute best” to claim a “really special” home victory at the Australian Grand Prix, but the McLaren driver believes it would be “optimistic” to expect the squad to replicate the form they displayed 12 months ago.

Off the back of winning the Teams’ Championship in 2024, McLaren looked strong arriving at the 2025 season-opener in Melbourne, with Lando Norris and Piastri sealing the front row of the grid in Qualifying – and while tricky weather conditions on Sunday saw Piastri slip backwards, Norris took the outfit’s first win of the campaign.

Quizzed ahead of this weekend’s 2026 event at the Albert Park Circuit about the chances of the papaya squad achieving a third Teams’ title in a row, Piastri responded: “We’ll have to wait and see – it’s a very different regulations set.

“I think it would be optimistic – or very optimistic – to say we’re going to have the same form as we did here 12 months ago. I think we’re somewhere towards the front, but from testing it feels like Mercedes and Ferrari got a little bit on us and Red Bull.

“But things are chopping and changing so quickly as everyone learns and brings things to the cars, so we’ll have to wait and see. I think last year we were coming here with very, very high hopes that we could achieve something special, and this year I think we can still have a good result, but to achieve the same kind of performance we’re going to have to find a bit more.”

With Piastri having appeared to take a step forwards during each previous off-season in his F1 career to date, the Australian was also quizzed on whether he expects to have done the same for 2026.

“It’s difficult to know because we’ve not started yet, but I think what’s different this year is the regulations reset,” he explained. “Having some of the off-seasons I’ve had previously, and some of the things I’ve learned from that, is transferable into this year but obviously some of the challenges and driving style changes and things we’re looking at are pretty different to what we’ve seen [before].

“I’m confident that I can take another step forward hopefully, just using the same kind of process as I have in the last few years, and we’ll see where we end up.”

Piastri, who debuted on the grid in 2023, admitted that to win the Australian Grand Prix – something no Australian has done since it joined the F1 calendar in 1985 – would be “really special”.

“I think every driver wants to win their home race and that’s no different for me,” the 24-year-old conceded. “Having it as a season opener, there’s a large element of the unknown there, but I would love to win here.

“If we’ve got the car to do it – and even if we don’t have the car to do it – I’ll be trying my absolute best to, but we’ll have to wait and see what kind of performance we’ve got.”

Pushed on why he feels that McLaren are slightly behind some of their rivals based on what he saw during pre-season testing, Piastri added: “There’s never much you can read into with times in testing – the only thing you can sort of get a read on are the race simulations that everyone does, even though they’re still not perfect, but to do a race simulation you need to fill the car up fully with fuel.

“I think some of the Ferrari race sims looked very, very strong. I think for Mercedes, whilst they never really did many race sims in Bahrain, the form and some of the laps that they’ve been able to put in [like in] Barcelona was pretty impressive, and I think they set the bar pretty high with coming in, having the car run pretty flawlessly and doing so many laps.

“The preparation from them seems to be strong, but I don’t think we’re far behind. I don’t know if we are behind at all, but the feeling is we’re in the mix but not right at pointy end, so if we can find a little bit more hopefully we can be.”