Piastri taking ‘plenty of positives’ despite unknowns on Thursday in Las Vegas

Oscar Piastri felt that there were “plenty of positives” to take from the opening day of action at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, despite there also being many unknowns after the Australian experienced limited running during second practice.

Having ended Free Practice 1 in eighth place on the timesheets, Piastri was unable to get many clean laps in during the second hour – which featured two red flags due to track maintenance – and classified in P14.

Despite this, the McLaren driver believes that there is still much to take from the day ahead of Friday’s running.

“I think FP1 was pretty good,” Piastri explained after FP2. “Some things to work on, but overall I felt like it was a pretty good session. FP2, I did two laps for the whole session. Difficult to know exactly where we sit.

“I think clearly the car’s got decent pace, but not that many people got a great run on the softs. A little bit difficult to know exactly where we sit, but still plenty of positives I think, plenty of things to look through overnight.”

When asked if the car was in a better place in comparison to last year in Las Vegas – a weekend that proved to be one of McLaren’s most challenging – Piastri responded: “I think so, yes.

“Again, it’s just very difficult to know because obviously it was a bit wet at the start, the track was evolving a lot, so it’s just difficult to know exactly where everyone sits.

“I think we changed a few things into FP2 which seemed to feel pretty good. We’ll try and do some more tweaking overnight and see what we’ve got.”

Looking ahead to the remainder of the weekend, Piastri was not deterred by the uncertainty posed by the limited running on Thursday.

“I feel okay,” the 24-year-old explained. “Would I have loved some more laps? Yes, but I think the track is going to continue to change quite a bit through the rest of the weekend. We’ll see what kind of weather we’ve got tomorrow, what we get here, and we’ll take it from there.”