Today marks the opening day of the 2024 F1 season and follows three days of pre-season testing in Bahrain last week.

There, Red Bull Racing marked itself out as the car to beat while McLaren fell into a compressed group of three or four teams battling to be, in all probability, third best team on the grid.

“I think we’re relatively happy with where we ended up,” Piastri said of McLaren’s position.

“There’s been a couple of hiccups along the way but I think every team has probably had a few.

“There’s just some things, as Andrea [Stella, team principal] has mentioned that, they’re not, in the timeframe we’ve had from the end of last year to this season, that’s just simply not the time to develop the ideas fully and get them on the car for the start of the year.

“So there’s certainly some things we still want to tackle and improve.”

McLaren last year struggled with low-speed content.

The MCL60 proved especially competitive at highspeed venues and through highspeed sections but gave up time on most of its rivals through lower-speed corners.

Addressing that has been a focus during the development of the MCL38. But it remains an issue, with understeer especially obvious through Turn 10 during testing.

“The car is reacting and working basically how we expect it to,” Piastri admitted.

“We still don’t really know where we sit. It could still be the case that we’re second or third quickest in qualifying or even in the race, we’ll have to see.

“But if Bahrain had been at the end of last season, we probably wouldn’t have been that optimistic even with the cars we had last year, just given the nature of this circuit and the layout of the tarmac.,” he added.

“We’ll have to wait and see. The championship isn’t won or lost in Bahrain, and it’s a very different circuit to a lot of tracks we go to.

“Of course, we want to be able to be strong at all kinds of track, and not just sort of wait for our strengths to come to light.”

Opening practice for the Bahrain Grand Prix begins at 14:30 local time (22:30 AEDT).