helena thessa

Piastri qualified two tenths behind Norris at Spa-Francorchamps, with virtually all of that deficit coming on the straight line between Stavelot and the Bus Stop Chicane, during the derating phase in which cars are running out of electric energy and are already starting to slow down.

The usual explanation is that Piastri wasn't able to optimise how his Mercedes battery harvested energy through the previous sector, with the likes of Pouhon and Fagnes used as 'charging stations' under the current iteration of the regulations.

But according to his team boss, there wasn't necessarily something Piastri himself could or should have done differently with his right foot.

"And across team-mates, if I compare Lando and Oscar in their best lap in Q3, Oscar is losing time in the final straight and Blanchimont for reasons that have nothing to do with Oscar's driving. They are just a minor deviation in how the power unit was operated."

Stella added: "I think [Piastri] could have been one to two tenths faster, just if the power unit had behaved as we anticipated."

The main reason is that these electric engines are not behaving in a stable, predictable manner, because they are learning on the fly. They build an information bank based on data gathered not only on previous runs, but even optimise deployment and predict future energy needs from corner to corner.

"You don't operate these power units in an open-loop way, whereby I would be able to have an offline simulation and say, oh, that's how the electrical power will be deployed, and it will always be identical to itself," [Andrea] Stella tried to explain. "There's a large component that happens with live calculations, and the power unit kind of forward thinks, forward calculates what it has to do based on some [parameters]. This is why it's not so easy to understand what kind of calculations have been made as the car was going."

Drivers are feeling like they are no longer just fighting their rivals, their car's grip limits and the laws of physics, but fighting their own power unit's machine learning algorithms.

Lando Norris / Belgian Grand Prix ‘26

Oscar Piastri / Belgian Grand Prix ‘26