Oscar Piastri believes that the changes to the Formula 1 power unit regulations to be introduced at the Miami Grand Prix are going “in the right direction”.

However, the Australian cautioned that there could still be “some quirks” and “unexpected” situations of the type that have caught drivers out in the early races.

On Monday the FIA announced a raft of changes after a meeting of F1 stakeholders, aimed primarily at improving qualifying and addressing the safety issues related to closing speeds.

Drivers had input into the changes through contact between the GPDA and the governing body, which allowed them a chance to express their reservations as a group.

Speaking at McLaren’s Woking base on Wednesday, Piastri backed the changes, while acknowledging that he will have a better idea after sampling them in the factory sim on Thursday.

“There should be less super clipping, with reducing the harvest limit,” he told media including Crash.net. “There definitely should be less in qualifying, and with the power of the super clip being increased, the time period will be less.

“I still need to go through all the details of all the rules, because I need someone smarter than me to explain what’s actually changed!

“But I think it’s a step in the right direction, for sure. The changes to the boost button, I think there will still be some quirks and situations that are a bit unexpected, but it’s generally in the right direction. The harvest limit becoming a bit lower, and having more flexibility, is in the right direction.”

Piastri stressed that Miami won’t necessarily provide the full picture as different issues have cropped up at the venues sampled thus far in testing and races.

“I think it will have to wait and see across a few different tracks,” he said. “And this is part of the regulation. We went to China, and we didn’t really have that many of these problems. We had some different problems which I think should be fixed, or as in I think will be fixed by these tweaks.

“But then you go to somewhere like Australia or Japan, and we have a completely different set of problems. So it will still chop and change a bit from circuit to circuit. But I think on the whole it is in the right direction. How far it goes in addressing the problems we'll have to wait and see until we get on track.”

Qualifying has been one of the main sources of frustration up to now, with drivers not always able to be on the limit, and small mistakes sometimes generating a heavy penalty later in the lap.

“I don’t know for sure, but I think some of the tweaks have hopefully removed some of those problems,” said Piastri. “I think every qualifying session so far, one of us has made a mistake somewhere, and actually it’s helped us rather than hurt us, which is not how it should be.

“So I’m pretty sure that these tweaks that they’ve just introduced will maybe not fully solve it but certainly go a ways to solving it.”

He cited Japan as an example of how the 2026 cars have to be driven: “You still have to drive the car on the limit, but just on the limit within a lot more kind of restrictions. At Suzuka we decided, and I think a lot of teams, decided, that the fastest way around the lap was to not get back on the throttle between the two Degners.

“But actually, what it meant was you had to be probably even braver than normal on the way into the Degner, because you knew if you didn’t go hard enough into the corner, if you got back on the throttle afterwards, it was going to be a penalty.

“And obviously we shouldn’t be having that debate in the first place, but ironically, it makes some places braver than they used to be before.

“So hopefully with these tweaks, it’s a little bit more back to normal, and you’re not so restricted in the way you have to try and find lap time.”