Oscar Piastri has apologised to his fans after crashing out of the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix on his way to the grid.
Half a million fans descended on Albert Park in Melbourne for the Australian GP, the grandstands a sea of papaya to support home hero Oscar Piastri.
But excitement soon turned to despair as the crowd saw the the McLaren at the side of the track before the race start, his car wrecked from hitting the barriers.
His retirement marks the second consecutive race misfortune has befallen Piastri at home, his hopes of victory dashed by a spin in changeable conditions.
Piastri delivered an honest assessment of his crash, highlighting several factors that led to him losing control of his MCL40.
“I’m just disappointed, a scenario like that just shouldn’t happen,” Piastri admitted to media, including Motorsport Week.
“We had a couple of things going on, but the first part, which I want to stress, is that a big element of it was me. I had cold tyres.
“It was just shock and surprise. I was backwards before I even really had a chance to react; it all happened pretty quickly.
“But crashing out of the race, whilst trying to get to the race, is a situation that shouldn’t happen.”
Oscar Piastri aware of gravitas of crash
Piastri explained that although cold tyres played a part in the crash, he held his hands up to driver error, before apologising to his legions of fans.
“I have used that exit kerb every lap of the weekend, but I didn’t need to there,” he said.
“At the same time, I had 100 kilowatts of extra power that I didn’t expect, which is not insignificant, but the difficult part to take is that everything was working normally. It is just the function of how the engines have to work with the rules.
“That’s the difficult part to accept. It would almost be easier in some ways if we just said there are cold tyres, and I was optimistic, but when you add in another factor like that, it is even more painful.
“I really don’t have many other words than that, but I’m just very sorry for everyone who came out to support me.
“It is clearly not the way I wanted to start the year.”
READ MORE: George Russell resists Charles Leclerc fight to score F1 Australian GP triumph
Discussion about this post