Oscar Piastri has admitted that McLaren’s team orders furore from the Italian Grand Prix was weighing on his mind as his Formula 1 title challenge began to slump in Baku.
The Australian entered the weekend at Monza with a 34-point lead over team-mate Lando Norris. During that race, he was asked to swap positions with the Brit out of fairness, as Norris had suffered a botched pit stop that put him behind Piastri.
It caused a degree of contention at the time from Piastri, but he and the team continued a united front on the ‘team first’ principles often espoused by the Woking-based squad.
The incident was the beginning of a drop off in results for Piastri, with the following race in Azerbaijan seeing a cataclysmic chain of events.
After crashing in qualifying, condemning him to a ninth-place grid start, Piastri then jumped the start, causing a trigger of his car’s anti-stall, sending him to the back of the field.
And after just four corners, his race was over, the McLaren skidding wide and planting into the wall as he tried to work his way back through the pack.
On F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast, Piastri was asked why his Baku nightmare occurred, and he began his answer by referring to the Monza incident.
“Ultimately a combination of quite a few things,” he said.
“Obviously the race before that was Monza, which I didn’t feel was a particularly great weekend from my own performance, and there was obviously what happened with the pitstops.
“But then also Baku itself, Friday was tough. Things weren’t working, I was overdriving.
“I wasn’t very happy with how I was driving and ultimately probably trying to make up for that a little bit on Saturday.”
Piastri reflects on ‘worst but most useful’ F1 weekend in Azerbaijan
Piastri continued that the rot set in on his Baku weekend from FP1, when his MCL39 suffered a power unit issue, and on top of that, a difficulty in getting used to the Soft tyre compound that Pirelli made available.
“There were some things in the lead-up, let’s say, that were maybe not the most helpful and then things that happened on the weekend – we had an engine problem in FP1 that kind of unsettled things a bit, then I was driving not that well, we were on C6 tyres that weekend that are now notoriously tricky to handle. There were just a lot of little things that kind of added up.
“I felt like on Saturday my pace was good but I was just trying a little too hard.
“That was the worst weekend I’ve ever had in racing, but probably the most useful in some ways.”
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