Why drivers are losing time to their own power units at Spa

McLaren’s reading of Oscar Piastri’s deficit to Lando Norris at Spa points away from driver error and toward something far less visible: the way the power unit is being managed on the straights. The sources say McLaren suspects Piastri’s two-tenth gap had “nothing to do with his driving” and instead was linked to its Formula 1 power unit algorithms, with virtually all of the loss coming on the straight line between Stavelot and the Bus Stop Chicane.

That matters because the time is not being lost in the corners most fans notice first. Instead, it is being bled away in the derating phase, when the car is effectively running out of usable deployment on the straight. In simple terms, two cars with similar underlying pace can still look separated by a meaningful gap once software, energy management, and engine-mode behavior start shaping how much performance is available at that point on the lap. The driver is still doing the same job, but the car may not be giving the same tools.

Spa is a strong example because it exposes how modern qualifying can be influenced by systems that sit beneath the driver’s hands. The stopwatch records the gap, but it does not explain whether both cars had the same straight-line deployment available to them. That is why the McLaren case is so instructive: it suggests the performance difference may have been created by configuration and control rather than by one driver simply doing a better job than the other. On a lap where tenths matter, the hidden layers of power-unit behavior can decide who looks quickest.

The detail about where the loss appears is important. According to the sources, the deficit was concentrated on the straight from Stavelot to the Bus Stop Chicane, which is exactly the kind of section where derating can have a visible effect. When the power unit is winding down its usable deployment, the car can lose time without any dramatic mistake from the driver. That makes the issue harder to detect from the outside and easier to misread as a pure driving comparison. A qualifying lap can therefore look like a driver-versus-driver story when the decisive factor may be happening inside the software.