Piastri encouraged by McLaren's altitude form in Mexico despite 'messy' FP2

Oscar Piastri left Friday practice at the Mexico City Grand Prix encouraged, saying his McLaren coped with the circuit's punishing altitude better than he had anticipated — even though his qualifying simulation on softs was "pretty messy."

Why it matters:

The Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez sits more than 2,200 metres above sea level, where thin air forces teams into minimal downforce and leaves cooling on a knife edge. It is one of the most demanding weekends on the calendar, and a car that behaves here tells a team plenty about its underlying balance.

The details:

• Piastri called conditions "difficult for sure," but added that "if anything it was probably a little bit better than I was expecting," with McLaren looking "relatively competitive."
• His soft-tyre lap contained "a couple of very big mistakes," yet he is confident the pace is there and that tidying them up would put him much further up the order.
• Ferrari, he said, "looked very strong" — no surprise at this track — and beating the Scuderia on Saturday will be "very tough," with the field tightly bunched.
• He pushed back on George Russell's suggestion that Ferrari's smaller turbo offers "quite an advantage" now the MGU-H has been dropped under the 2026 rules, noting the Ferrari looked "a bit slow on the straights."
• Low grip, he added, is a familiar story with this year's cars rather than a Mexico-specific problem, with engine cooling the bigger challenge.

What's next:

Qualifying will show whether McLaren's Friday pace is genuine or flattered by Piastri's errors — and whether Ferrari's altitude edge is real.