14 races without a podium, Oscar Piastri admits that McLaren is currently on the back foot in its battle with Red Bull.

Last weekend saw the 2025 world champions slip to fourth in the constructor standings, and Piastri fears that his team is not currently in a position to match its Austrian rivals.

"At the moment, we know we're not as competitive consistently as what Red Bull are," he told reporters in Mexico. "But we're adding performance to the car still.

"There's a lot of things that can happen," he continued. "Reliability has been a big topic this year, so there's still plenty of ways it can turn. But clearly on pure performance, we need to make some steps forward.

"We still have some things coming to the car that'll hopefully help with that," he added. "But I think for us it's going to be a big challenge to stay ahead of Red Bull.

"But we're always up for it," he smiled. "I think we've got some answers, not all of them, but I think we've got a pretty good idea of certainly a direction of why things weren't quite as smooth as we would have hoped.

"A lot of them are things I can keep working on for this weekend. Some of them have been similar to some of the struggles earlier in the season as well. So there's plenty of races and laps still to go to keep working on."

Despite fears to the contrary, the Australian also believes the characteristics of the Mexican track could suit the 2026 power units.

"I think the layout of the circuit actually lends itself pretty well to these power units," he said. "You've got kind of a nice even distribution of straights and slow corners

"So I think from a straight-line speed and deployment point of view, it should look relatively normal. But whether you use a whole bunch of energy making up for the turbo or not, we'll find out tomorrow."