McLaren driver Oscar Piastri has revealed that team orders at the Italian Grand Prix were still resonating in his mind when he suffered a complicated weekend at the following race in Baku.
In Monza, in September, Piastri, then championship leader, was ordered to concede second place to his teammate Lando Norris after having gained the position following a mix-up in the pit stops. At that moment, Piastri qualified the decision as “fair” and stated that he and McLaren were “aligned” on the decision.
Two weeks later, in Azerbaijan, Piastri crashed in both qualifying and the race, a pointless weekend that marked the beginning of a slump that has left him 24 points behind Norris with three races to go.
Piastri has acknowledged that the decisions at Monza affected him. “Obviously, the previous race was Monza, where I didn’t feel it was a particularly good weekend for my performance and, obviously, what happened with the pit stops happened,” Piastri commented on the F1 Beyond the Grid podcast.
“But then, in Baku, Friday was difficult, things weren’t working, I was forcing it, I wasn’t very happy with how I was driving and, ultimately, probably trying to compensate a bit on Saturday,” he added.
“I think there were some things in the previous period, let’s say, that perhaps weren’t the most useful and then things that happened over the weekend.”Oscar Piastri luce abatido después de estrellarse en el Gran Premio de Azerbaiyán en septiembre.“We had an issue with the engine in FP1 that destabilized things a bit, and then I wasn’t driving so well. We were on C6 tires [Pirelli’s softest compound] that weekend, which are notoriously difficult to manage. There were many small things that eventually added up,” explained Piastri.
In Italy, Piastri was the first to pit despite not being the leading car, as McLaren feared the threat of Charles Leclerc in fourth place. A slow pit stop delayed Norris behind Piastri and the duo in the battle for the title swapped positions, because Piastri pitted first, not because of a pit stop error. Piastri hasn’t won a race since then.
Piastri stated that everything added up to his “worst weekend” in racing. “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…”
“There’s no point in beating around the bush, that was the worst weekend I’ve had in racing, but probably the most useful in some ways. So, when you can start to see things like that, normally that helps you a lot.”
“[If] you look at some of the names who have had some pretty impactful weekends, or weekends or races or almost incredible moments in their careers where things have gone wrong; it happens to anyone.”
“There isn’t a single person in racing who doesn’t have some kind of disastrous story about how a weekend went wrong for them. Looking at it from that perspective helps a lot, but you still need to learn the things you need to learn from weekends like that.”
