Oscar Piastri has professed that “a lot is going wrong at the moment” as he surrendered more ground in the Formula 1 title race with a troubled Sao Paulo Grand Prix.
Piastri’s wretched run continued at Interlagos as a crash in the Sprint Race preceded him collecting a penalty that resigned him to a fifth-place finish in the Grand Prix.
With Lando Norris picking up maximum points once again in the sister McLaren, Piastri has now slipped 24 points behind his team-mate with three rounds remaining.
Piastri, who boasted a 34-point lead at one stage, seemed to have turned a corner when he all but matched Norris’ headline time in the sole practice session in Brazil.
The Australian never troubled Norris once the competitive action commenced, though, citing that he became less at one with the McLaren as the weekend developed.
“Things have not been going easily, that’s for sure,” Piastri, who has now gone five consecutive races without a podium, told media including Motorsport Week.
“This weekend, there was definitely moments and flashes where I felt very comfortable. Practice, things were coming much more easily again, things felt really good.
“It kind of went away from us a little bit through the weekend.
“I think even just our pace as a team I don’t think was as strong as it was on Friday and the car kind of went in a direction that I wasn’t a big fan of.
“But we tried our best to get the car in a good window. Obviously the Sprint crash made things much more difficult as well.
“There’s just a lot of things going wrong at the moment, but I think there’s still flashes of really strong pace and it’s just about trying to make sure we’ve got that all the time.”
Piastri aiming to ‘add more tools to my arsenal’
Piastri’s slump over the past three rounds has coincided with trips to tracks with lower grip levels, an element that he and McLaren have admitted has caught him out.
“Yeah, I mean, I think the last three weekends in particular are a similar trend,” he explained. “I think Austin I had to drive very, very differently. Mexico, the same.
“And it’s kind of one thing adapting to different conditions, but when the way you’ve driven for the whole season has worked so well, it’s kind of difficult to go away from that.
“So there’s been a lot of learning on that side of things and trying to adapt to different things.
“I think this weekend, practice was really, really strong. It felt like I couldn’t go slow in practice pretty much. Then through the rest of the weekend things just went away from us a bit more.
“The Soft tyre was obviously behaving very strangely this weekend and it was hardly better than the Medium.
“The grip conditions yesterday were again very bizarre. To not go any quicker from Q1 to Q3 is almost unheard of, especially after so much rain.
“So clearly something has been a bit odd. The car’s been more or less the same. We’ve been trying to put it in the same window, but just other factors have made things difficult.
“But I’m also trying to work on how I can adapt to that better and kind of add more tools to my arsenal.”
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