Look, nobody ever said taming a Formula 1 machine at high altitude was going to be simple. As Speedcafe reports, Oscar Piastri had a proper handful of a Friday at the Mexico City Grand Prix, yet he walked away genuinely encouraged by what his McLaren had to offer. Sure, the timesheets told one story—he wound up 10th in FP2, sitting 0.539s slower than teammate Lando Norris, who had spent the earlier session watching from the sidelines while Leonardo Fornaroli jumped into his McLaren and took 17th. Norris bounced straight back to second in the afternoon, just 0.103s behind Charles Leclerc's Ferrari, leaving Piastri playing catch-up over a single lap.
That said, the raw speed was lurking beneath the chaos. Piastri admitted his soft-tyre run in the second session was far from clean, pointing to a couple of very big mistakes that completely derailed his single-lap potential. But rather than panic, the Australian saw reason for optimism in those very errors, knowing that tidying up the execution would rocket him right back up the order.
Ferrari certainly made their presence felt right away, with Leclerc topping both sessions to back up expectations on this tarmac. While rival George Russell had flagged on Thursday that Ferrari's smaller turbocharger—courtesy of the 2026 regulations and the removal of the MGU-H—might hand them a decisive advantage up in the thin air, Piastri wasn't buying the hype. In fact, he noted that the red cars actually looked a bit slow on the straights, dismissing the idea that the turbo setup was an instant silver bullet.
Add in the slippery reality of a resurfaced circuit coupled with engine cooling headaches across the pit lane, and you have a recipe for a deeply stressful weekend for the engineers. But with the entire field looking brutally tight, Piastri knows that beating Ferrari on Saturday will be a monumental mountain to climb. The battle lines are drawn, and everyone is going to have to be on top of their game when FP3 kicks off at 4.30am AEDT Sunday.
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