Piastri: McLaren’s team orders in Monza influenced his crashes in Baku

Oscar Piastri revealed that McLaren’s team orders at the Italian Grand Prix were still on his mind during the race weekend in Azerbaijan. In Monza, the championship leader at that moment, Piastri, was ordered to concede second place to his teammate Lando Norris after having gained the position.

“Obviously, the previous race was Monza, where I didn’t feel it was a particularly good weekend for my performance, and obviously the pit stop thing happened.”

Oscar Piastri

Two weeks later, in Azerbaijan, Piastri suffered accidents in both qualifying and the race, marking the beginning of a streak that left him 24 points behind Norris. Piastri admitted that Monza’s decisions affected him. “In Baku, Friday was difficult, things weren’t working, I was overdriving, I wasn’t very happy with how I was driving and, ultimately, probably trying to compensate for that a bit on Saturday.” Piastri also mentioned an engine problem in the first practice session that destabilized things a bit, added to the difficulty of managing Pirelli’s C6 tires.

In Italy, Piastri was the first to enter the pits, despite not being the leading car, due to the threat of Charles Leclerc. A slow stop delayed Norris, and the drivers swapped positions. Piastri described the weekend in Baku as his worst racing experience. “Ultimately, Baku was the perfect storm of quite a few things,” he said. “Obviously, it was a pretty terrible weekend, but I think the amount of learning we had from that weekend, from a technical and emotional point of view…” Piastri added that, although it was the worst weekend of his career, it turned out to be very useful in many ways. “When you can start to see things like that, normally that helps you quite a bit,” he concluded.