Piastri will line up third behind Max Verstappen and his McLaren team-mate, Lando Norris, for Saturday’s 100km encounter.
It marks a turnaround from a difficult Spanish Grand Prix where set-up choices made early in the weekend compounded to hinder his progress come the race itself.
Piastri and the team worked through those decisions in the days that followed and the Australian headed to the Red Bull Ring confident that he understood where he came unstuck.
“We found that potentially some of the ways in which we try to maximize the car made the car just too peaky and this meant when you nail everything the car is quick but not very forgiving,” team boss Andrea Stella explained of Piastri’s Spanish GP.
“Potentially we have learned that his direction is just too extreme and if we did it again we would have gone for something more robust and less peaky.”
Those lessons were immediately reflected in the 23-year-old’s pace in the weekend’s only practice session as he banked the second-fastest time.
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He then backed that up with third in Sprint Qualifying, though three-tenths back from the outright pace.
“Mostly,” he said when asked if he was happy with how the session ended.
“I think the position is quite good, obviously, but the last lap there was a couple corners I could tidy up.
“It’s nice to at least know where the time is, obviously a bit of a rough one last weekend, so feel like we’re back on the pace.
“The gap to Max is not massive,” he added.
“I know there was a couple of big mistakes on that lap, so I think we’re definitely in the mix.”
McLaren was one of five teams to have listed upgrades this weekend, with Piastri satisfied with the gains the new front wing and revised front suspension has delivered thus far.
“The focus is to keep the development direction that we introduced trackside with the front wing we took to Miami,” explained Stella of the new wing.
“We saw that that concept worked well, so we wanted to pursue furthermore this direction, and this is another attempt to improve in particularly the low-speed behaviour of the car.
“The suspension is just the fairings, just the shrouds, because when you change the front wing it changes slightly the flow that goes to the back of the car and so you need to optimise the components downstream for the slight variation in the flow topology,” he added.
“This is very normal. I think I see more and more when teams bring a front wing upgrade, they also then upgrade brake ducts and suspension shrouds.
“That’s purely aerodynamics.”
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