Oscar Piastri reckons Monza is about to get properly chaotic, and for once he’s not talking about his own championship campaign. The McLaren driver has flagged Formula 1’s brutal new energy management rules as the thing to watch this weekend, with the Temple of Speed set to expose exactly how badly the sport’s 2026 power unit regulations cope with a track that offers almost nothing to harvest and everything to burn.
Monza’s Energy Problem, Explained by the Man Living It
The 2026 rulebook ditched the MGU-H and cranked up the electrical side of the hybrid system, which sounds great in a press release and rather less great when you’re trying to find enough battery charge to survive a lap that’s mostly flat out. Circuits like Monza and Silverstone are the extreme cases: long straights, heavy braking zones that come and go too quickly, and barely any opportunity to claw back the energy the cars are burning through at full throttle.
Piastri laid out the dilemma facing the FIA in blunt terms, telling media including RacingNews365 that there was never going to be a clean solution.
“You just don’t really have much energy to use. At a circuit like this, you’ve got a problem no matter which direction you go.” – Oscar Piastri
Give teams a higher harvest limit and they’ll over-harvest, triggering excessive “super clipping”, the awkward power cut that happens when the battery is full and there’s nowhere left to dump the recovered energy. Drop the limit too far, though, and there simply isn’t enough juice to deploy down the straights, which tanks top speed at the one track built entirely around top speed. It’s a lose-lose, and Piastri knows it.
The FIA’s Fix, and Why Monza Still Breaks It
Midway through the season the FIA revised the qualifying recharge threshold and widened the list of events where alternative limits apply, specifically trying to shrink those super clipping periods and make qualifying laps feel properly flat-out again rather than punctuated by power cuts. Monza sits right at the sharp end of that recalibration: a 5MJ qualifying limit and 7MJ for the race, the lowest qualifying allowance currently forecast anywhere on the calendar. That number alone tells you how stingy this circuit is when it comes to giving the battery anything back.
Piastri thinks the governing body picked the lesser evil rather than a genuine cure.
“If the harvest limit was higher, we would be super clipping everywhere and probably losing 30 or 40 kph at the end of each straight. But they’ve dropped the harvest limit, which means super clipping is a normal-ish amount or, let’s say, a reasonable amount. It’s still there, but also you then don’t have as much energy to spend on the straights, so the actual top speed is quite low.” – Oscar Piastri
He went further, pointing out a detail that undercuts the entire idea of Monza as a pure speed trap this year.
“In our sim running, I think we were actually quicker on the front straight in Hungary than we were here, which, yeah, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it’s more that we just don’t have the energy to spend. But again, if you gave us the energy to spend, we then don’t have anywhere to harvest it. So you run into a problem no matter which way you go. And for me, I think this is the correct direction to go in and have a sensible amount of super clipping.” – Oscar Piastri
A McLaren driver going quicker down Monza’s front straight in a Hungary simulation is the kind of stat that should embarrass a sport built on the promise of ever-faster cars. Instead it’s being presented as an acceptable trade-off, and Piastri, to his credit, isn’t pretending otherwise. He’s just picking the least stupid of two stupid options, which is roughly the energy with which most of the paddock is approaching this rulebook.
The Bigger Problem Piastri Isn’t Solving as Easily
All this talk of harvest limits and super clipping is genuinely useful context for the weekend, but it also conveniently sidesteps the more uncomfortable question hanging over Piastri right now. His teammate Lando Norris has won the last two races, in Hungary and at Zandvoort, and dragged McLaren back to the front of the field almost single-handedly. Piastri fought Norris for the win in Hungary before retiring, but at Zandvoort he trailed home some 32 seconds behind his teammate, a gap that has nothing to do with joules or super clipping and everything to do with raw pace he simply didn’t have.
As reported by Formula1.com, the Dutch Grand Prix also marked a full year since Piastri last stood on the top step of a podium, a statistic that says more about his 2026 than any qualifying limit ever will. Speaking on Thursday’s media day, Piastri admitted the issue isn’t a single fixable fault but a moving target from one weekend to the next.
“I think it’s never been the same issue or thing we’re chasing every weekend. It’s always been slightly different which I think kind of raises a bigger question. If it was just one thing we kept struggling with it would, in some ways, be a bit of an easy fix but I think the fact we’ve kind of found different ways of having difficulty, we’ve been trying to answer that question.” – Oscar Piastri
He insists progress is being made behind the scenes, both in how he drives the car and how the car is set up, but admits the only real test is track time. Given the standings currently show him 138 points adrift of championship leader Kimi Antonelli and 55 points behind his own teammate, “hopefully we can find something that works a bit better” is not exactly a rallying cry.
Piastri’s energy management theory is sound, and Monza will almost certainly be a mess of top speeds that don’t behave the way logic suggests they should. But the more revealing admission this week wasn’t about joules or super clipping at all. It was Piastri conceding that his own problems change shape every weekend, which is a far harder thing to fix than a battery that won’t charge. Monza might be extraordinary for everyone else on the grid. For Piastri, it just needs to be a race where he stops finding new ways to lose ground.
