Oscar Piastri has made a damning admission about driving the 2026 Formula 1 cars, stating that the AI reduces his input at points when out on track.
Piastri is enduring a challenging season, struggling to get to grips with the new generation of car, yet to win a race in 2026.
The Australian has been one of the more quieter drivers in giving his verdict on the cars, which feature a near 50:50 split in electrical and internal combustion power.
But he has made an damning admission over the computer systems onboard the cars, which actively learns the circuit and how to deploy the battery during a lap.
“Sometimes, yes,” Piastri said to media, including Motorsport Week, if he “felt like a passenger of the AI systems”.
“At a track like Spa or a track like Silverstone, it’s going to be worse. At the Hungaroring or Zandvoort, I really don’t expect there to be many problems at all with that kind of thing, because the straights are so much shorter, so even if there are differences, they should be a lot less.
“But the principle of driving a race car that loses effectively half of its power before the end of the straight is hard to get your head around sometimes.
Oscar Piastri details AI issues
Elaborating on his point, Piastri detailed the radical way the car learns the sectors of the legendary Spa circuit.
“Even in Spa, a lot of the middle sector we were doing it just on the combustion engine, with no battery assistance at all, which is a weird feeling in itself, having some corners with a certain amount of power and others with full power.
“I think Spa was particularly frustrating, not just for me but for quite a lot of others, because those small differences in the code and what the engines did made quite a big difference in lap time.
“Especially at the front of the field, I think there were still only nine hundredths or something separating four positions, and there were definitely more than nine hundredths on the table for quite a few drivers from things they could not control.”
Piastri’s feedback on the car’s AI systems highlights the journey F1 faces with these regulations. For a driver to feel like a passenger is not a sentiment many will want to experience.
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