Oscar Piastri heads into this weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix conscious of the challenge ahead with just an hour of practice – likely to be run in wet conditions.
This weekend marks a return of the F1 Sprint format, with qualifying for Sunday’s race taking place on Friday evening.
As cars roll out of the garage for that session, they enter parc ferme, giving drivers and teams a 60-minute outing to set up their weekend.
That challenge is magnified by the prospect of inclement weather, which is set to remain throughout the weekend.
“It’s going to be very difficult,” the McLaren rookie conceded when asked about the challenge ahead by Speedcafe.
” I haven’t been here for three years now; there’s been a couple of small changes since then.
“But one practice session, a lot of wet weather around; it’s difficult as a driver, but also for the team because… it’s already difficult on a dry weekend because we enter parc ferme before qualifying on Friday.
“So we have an hour to sort out everything, like the balance, whether our skids are going to survive for the whole weekend, and when it’s wet, it adds another element of complication to that.
“It’s the same challenge for everybody, of course, but it’s a challenge nonetheless.
” I’m looking forward to getting back out there, hopefully, we can have another strong weekend, whether it’s wet or dry, but we’ll see how we go.”
Piastri heads into the Belgian GP on a wave of confidence following two strong performances in the British and Hungarian Grands Prix, finishing fourth and fifth, respectively.
The 22-year-old was self-critical of the latter, highlighting his lack of experience regarding tyre management as a critical factor.
However, post-event analysis also revealed he picked up debris which became lodged in his floor on Lap 2, costing him performance which was exacerbated later in the race.
“I think more of it was down to the damage than I thought,” he said with regards to his drop off in the latter half of the race.
“I still don’t want to use that as a cop-out because there was definitely things I need to work on, but we had a little bit of carbon stuck in the flow from Lap 2, which I don’t think did that much.
“On lap 30 or so I picked up reasonably significant damage, which, yeah, that made life pretty difficult after that.
“But even before I picked up that damage I was struggling a little bit, so I don’t want to put it all down to that.”
Opening practice for the Belgian Grand Prix begins at 13:30 local time (21:30 AEST).
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