Oscar Piastri suspects the call to extend his opening stint in a bid to beat McLaren team-mate Lando Norris in Formula 1‘s Austrian Grand Prix was the wrong choice.
Piastri was consigned to having his championship advantage slashed to 15 points at the Red Bull Ring as Norris converted pole position to head McLaren’s latest 1-2.
The Australian did have his opportunities to reverse the order, though, during an enthralling beginning to the race that saw the two McLaren drivers go wheel-to-wheel.
Having passed Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc at the start to climb into second, Piastri then spied the chance to grab the lead when he overtook Norris into Turn 3 on Lap 11.
However, Norris executed a switchback on the exit that gave him the inside line on the run down to Turn 4 in an act that would prove decisive in the eventual outcome.
Norris holding the lead ensured he was prioritised once the McLaren pit crew were called into the pitlane on Lap 20, but Piastri opted against stopping on the next lap.
Instead, Piastri emerged six seconds behind his team-mate when he exited the pits on Lap 25, a gap that he was unable to close fully across the remaining two stints.
“I thought it was an entertaining race,” Piastri expressed to media including Motorsport Week.
“After the first stop, maybe we didn’t do the right thing giving Lando some breathing room, but the first 20 laps were pretty intense. So, it was a good battle.”
Why Piastri extended his opening stint
Piastri divulged that he was certain that it would be hard to get back inside the one-second window needed to utilise the DRS with tyres that were only one lap fresher.
“I knew that I was always going to be pitting second in that scenario,” he expanded.
“For me, it felt like if I couldn’t stay within DRS, then getting back inside one second was going to be very, very tough.
“So, I kind of wanted to go a bit different and give myself some fresher tyres and hopefully be able to use them at the end of the stint.
“It didn’t really pan out that way, unfortunately, but that was the thinking at least. We’ll go back and look and see whether that was the right thing to do.
“In the moment, I was always going to lose some amount of time by pitting a lap later, so I kind of went, why not try something a bit different?”
Asked whether the team should have been more insistent that he cover Norris as soon as possible, Piastri said: “I don’t know yet. We’ll go back and look through it.
“Like I said before, I think I was always going to lose time by pitting second.
“I had past experience of being just stuck outside DRS, and that was a pretty painful place to be in the past. So, I didn’t really want to be there again.
“In the moment, I thought that giving myself a bit more work to do but with better tyres was going to be an interesting option.
“With hindsight, yeah, maybe you can say it wasn’t the right call, but there’s a lot of things you can say in hindsight.”
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