Montoya Urges Oscar Piastri to Risk MCL40 Setups
Juan Pablo Montoya’s Challenge to Oscar Piastri: Why Calculated Risk Is Now Essential in the McLaren MCL40 Era
In Formula 1, the most dangerous place for a driver is not at the back of the grid, but in the middle of a performance plateau. Juan Pablo Montoya knows that territory well, and his recent assessment of Oscar Piastri’s position at McLaren is less a criticism than a warning drawn from experience. Speaking to news.com.au, Montoya argued that Piastri must stop trying to make a car that does not suit him work well enough, and instead ask McLaren for permission to make it work badly for a while in pursuit of a genuine answer.
His message was direct. If the car as it is does not allow Piastri to access his best level, then twelve more weekends of trying to optimise around that compromise will not solve the problem. What might solve it is deliberate, structured experimentation, even if it costs results in the short term.
The Core of Montoya’s Argument
Montoya’s proposal is built on a simple distinction that engineers understand but teams often struggle to accept during a championship fight. There is a difference between consistency and comprehension.
“What is working for Lando isn’t necessarily going to work for Oscar and what Oscar wants out of the car is completely different,” Montoya said. “Oscar should go to McLaren and say, ‘Hey, let me experiment, even if we get it completely wrong. Let me go down a couple of rabbit holes.’ Who cares? You’ve still got 12 races left, sacrifice two or three for the other nine, instead of having another 12 average races.”
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That framing reframes the current intra-team battle. It is not about one driver outperforming the other on a given Sunday. It is about two elite drivers requiring fundamentally different things from the same technical package, at a time when the regulations make those differences more visible than at any point in the last four years.
For Piastri, whose reputation was built on clinical precision, high minimum speed, and exceptional tyre management, the invitation to embrace instability is counterintuitive. For Montoya, it is the only logical path forward.
The Technical Divide: Why the Same Car Feels Like Two Different Cars
To understand why Norris currently looks more at home in the MCL40, you have to look at how drivers create lap time when aerodynamic grip is reduced.
The 2026 regulations have stripped away a significant portion of the downforce that defined the previous ground-effect era. The cars are lighter in aero load, more dependent on mechanical platform, and far more sensitive to how the power unit deploys energy out of corners. In that environment, the way a driver manages rotation in the middle of the corner becomes decisive.
Telemetry and on-board analysis from this season show a consistent pattern. Norris is comfortable with a car that is looser on entry, that rotates earlier and requires a correction. He carries that rotation, accepts a small slide, and is able to get to throttle earlier because the car is already pointing where he needs it. It is a high workload style, it looks busy on camera, but it can produce higher minimum speed in slow and medium speed corners when the rear is not fully planted.
Piastri’s natural style is different and historically very effective. He prefers a more stable rear platform, a predictable front end that allows him to roll speed in, maintain a smooth steering trace, and build throttle in a linear way. In the high downforce cars of 2022 to 2025, that approach maximised tyre life, gave him excellent race pace, and made him incredibly hard to pass. The car stayed within a narrow slip angle window, and he operated right at the edge of it.
The MCL40, by design and by necessity, does not naturally live in that narrow window. With less aero support, the rear moves more. The power unit, under the new energy deployment rules, delivers torque in a different shape, which changes traction demands. To be fast in this car, you often have to drive it beyond its stable point and then manage it back. If you wait for stability, you wait too long. If you try to force your traditional style onto it, you end up under-driving the entry and overloading the front tyre on exit.
This is not a case of favouritism or unequal equipment. It is a common reality in top teams. When a team develops a car, it follows the feedback loop that gives it the most immediate performance return. If one driver can extract time from a looser balance, the development direction will naturally drift that way, because it shows up in the wind tunnel correlation and in lap time simulation. The other driver is then left trying to adapt to a car that is moving away from his preferred operating window.
The MCL40 Itself: A Deliberate Gamble
McLaren’s decision making for 2026 deserves context. The team entered this cycle as reigning constructors’ champions, but chose not to evolve a conservative concept. Under Andrea Stella and the technical leadership, McLaren opted for a shorter wheelbase MCL40. The logic was clear. A shorter car gives you agility, quicker change of direction, and potentially better performance in the low speed sections that dominate many modern circuits.
The trade off is that it reduces your aerodynamic platform stability, makes it harder to manage rear tyre temperature, and narrows the setup window where the car feels predictable.
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That trade off has shown up in two ways. First, upgrades have been harder to introduce. When your baseline platform is already sensitive, a new front wing or floor edge that shifts the aero balance even by half a percent can move you outside the window you understood. Second, the car demands more driving correction. For Norris, who has always thrived when he can manipulate the car on entry, that sensitivity is a tool. For Piastri, it is a variable he has to manage rather than exploit.
Add to that the integration of the Mercedes power unit under new regulations. The energy deployment strategy is now a much larger performance differentiator. Drivers are asked to manage harvesting and deployment lap by lap, and the way that deployment interacts with traction out of slow corners changes the car balance in real time.
McLaren has been public that both drivers are still learning how to extract the final tenth from this system, but the driver who is already comfortable sliding the rear can use that slide to mask a slightly early or aggressive deployment. The driver who wants stability feels that deployment as a disturbance.
From Disruption to Pattern: How 2026 Has Unfolded
Piastri’s season has not been a straight line of underperformance. It began with disruption that would unsettle any driver.
He did not start his home race in Australia after an incident on the formation lap, a weekend where expectations were enormous. In China, an electrical issue prevented him from taking the grid. Those two non starts in the opening rounds meant he entered the season with almost no race mileage in the new car while his teammate was accumulating data.
The recovery was impressive. Second place in Japan and third in Miami showed that the underlying pace was there. Those circuits rewarded precisely the qualities Piastri has always excelled at: high commitment in high speed direction changes at Suzuka, and disciplined tyre management in the heat of Miami.
Since Miami, however, the pattern has changed. Seven consecutive events outside the top three is not reflective of a lack of speed, but it is reflective of a lack of peak extraction. Qualifying head to head has tilted toward Norris in recent rounds, often by less than a tenth, but that tenth in 2026 often represents the difference between being able to control the race from the clean side and being stuck in the turbulent air where the MCL40’s sensitivity to dirty air becomes more pronounced.
Hungary was illustrative. Piastri led a substantial phase of the race, managing traffic and tyre degradation well. Contact with a lapped car, Carlos Sainz, while navigating blue flags cost him momentum at a critical moment, and a subsequent gearbox failure forced retirement. Norris went on to win. The result stretched the points gap to around 36 points. More importantly, it highlighted how small incidents in this era have larger consequences because recovering the tyre and energy window after being forced off line is so difficult.
Why Risk Is More Rational Than Consistency
This is where Montoya’s logic becomes uncomfortable for a team fighting for a championship. In a constructors’ battle against Mercedes and Ferrari, every point matters. Asking to sacrifice two or three race weekends to run experiments sounds irresponsible from a pit wall perspective.
From a driver development perspective, it is the most responsible thing you can do.
Formula 1 history is full of drivers who tried to salvage a season by being consistently decent while their teammate defined the car. The short term outcome is that you finish fourth or fifth every week, you keep the points ticking, but you never build a technical case for why the car should evolve toward you. By the end of the season, the team has twelve months of data that says the current direction works for at least one car, so it continues down that path over the winter.
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The drivers who reverse that trend are the ones who force a fork in development. They use free practice one and free practice two not to refine the baseline, but to test something fundamentally different. A different mechanical balance, a different differential map, a different way of using the energy deployment that feels unnatural at first but might open a new direction.
Sometimes those experiments lead to a P12 in qualifying and a difficult Sunday. But they give the engineering team two distinct data sets. They show what happens when you stop trying to make the car work for both drivers and start trying to understand what each driver needs to be at his best.
Montoya is suggesting that Piastri has enough races left to afford that approach. Twelve races is a full third of a season. If three of them are compromised while he explores a setup that rewards his natural inputs with more front end support and a more connected rear, he still has nine races to capitalise on what he learns. If he spends all twelve trying to copy a style that is not his, he risks ending the year with a comprehensive defeat that is harder to explain away as circumstantial.
The Simulator Window and the Dutch Grand Prix Test
Piastri’s response so far suggests he understands this. Reports from Woking indicate he plans to use the mid-season break for extensive simulator work focused specifically on driving technique adaptation rather than simply waiting for new parts.
The simulator is crucial here. In the real world, you cannot test ten different balance philosophies in a single day. In the simulator, you can. You can move brake balance forward, change engine braking, alter the differential entry maps, and see how the car reacts when you ask it to do something different. The key is to approach those sessions not as preparation for Zandvoort, but as research for the remaining twelve races.
McLaren’s scheduled rear wing update for the Dutch Grand Prix will be an early test of whether this exploratory mindset is being supported organisationally. A new rear wing in 2026 is not just about drag level. It changes the aero map, it changes how the rear behaves when DRS closes, it changes the stability under braking. If McLaren can deliver a wing that widens the operating window, rather than simply adding peak load, it could give both drivers more room to find their own optimum. That would be the ideal engineering response to Montoya’s challenge.
Team Environment Under Stella
None of this happens in a toxic environment, and that is to McLaren’s credit. After the intense title fight of 2025 between Norris and Piastri, many expected friction. According to Stella, the opposite has occurred. The relationship between the two drivers has strengthened, precisely because the competition was so direct and the team managed it transparently.
That collaborative foundation matters. In teams where drivers are isolated, experimentation can be seen as a threat. In a team where information flows freely, one driver’s rabbit hole can become the team’s learning. If Piastri finds a differential setting that gives him more confidence on entry, even if it costs him a bit on exit, Norris can evaluate whether that same setting gives him more consistency in race stints. The team learns twice.
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Stella’s challenge is balancing short term constructors’ points with long term driver equity. It is easy to say you have two equal drivers. It is harder to give both drivers the freedom to pursue divergent development paths when one path is currently yielding podiums and the other is yielding data.
What Adaptation Means for the Next Regulatory Cycle
The 2026 rules have reset the driving skill set. Drivers whose entire single seater education happened in high downforce cars are having to unlearn certain reflexes. The generation that experienced multiple regulation changes, like Norris and before him Alonso, Hamilton and Verstappen, has an advantage in that they have already had to rewrite muscle memory once or twice in their careers.
Piastri’s adaptation is therefore not just about 2026. It is about the next three seasons of this regulation cycle. The drivers who adapt fastest now will shape the cars of 2027 and 2028, because their feedback will be the one that correlates with performance. If Piastri can demonstrate that a more stable platform can still produce lap time in this era, McLaren will be forced to retain that philosophy in its future concepts. If he cannot, the team will logically continue to build cars that reward the looser, more corrective style.
Montoya’s intervention is valuable because it shifts the conversation away from narrative and toward agency. It is easy to say the car does not suit him. It is harder, and more useful, to ask what he and the team are going to do about it.
The final twelve races offer a rare opportunity. There is enough time to experiment, enough points at stake to keep motivation high, and enough data from the first half of the year to know that simply doing the same thing will not close the gap. Whether Piastri is given the organisational cover to have two or three difficult Fridays and Saturdays in pursuit of a better Sunday will determine not just his finishing position in 2026, but the trajectory of his career within this era of Formula 1.
The best drivers in this sport have never been the ones who only minimised damage. They have been the ones who were willing to look uncompetitive for a weekend in order to understand something that made them unbeatable for a season.
That is the challenge Montoya has laid down, and the clock to answer it starts at Zandvoort.
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