Did McLaren’s orders undermine Oscar Piastri’s confidence?
The Australian spoke on the Formula 1 podcast and marked a key moment of the season that was harmed by an internal action by the team.
Oscar Piastri had just won the Netherlands GP and extended his gap to 34 points over his teammate Lando Norris in the fight for the title. With this light, the Australian faced the Italian GP, date 16. In Monza, the Englishman had been faster than the one from Melbourne, far from the dominant Max Verstappen, butn Lando’s last pit stop, the McLaren team had a problem changing tires and returned to the track behind Oscar, with seven laps left in the race. But…
“Oscar, the team experienced a problem and you must give the place to Lando.” More words, less words, that was the message that came from the kitchen of the Woking team to Piastri, who incredibly had to give up the position to the Englishman for something totally unrelated to him. The Australian reluctantly accepted the order. Since then, his progress in the World Cup went downhill. In fact, in Azerbaijan, the competition after the Italian one, the ocean car crashed in qualifying and on the first lap of the race.
In an interview with Beyond the Grid, the F1 podcast, Piastri admitted that Monza took its toll on his approach in Baku: “Ultimately, it was a combination of several things. Obviously, the previous race had been Monza, which I didn’t think was a particularly good weekend in terms of my performance, and obviously there was what happened with the pit stops.. But also Baku itself, Friday was difficult. Things weren’t working. I wasn’t too happy with how I was driving and ultimately I probably tried to make up for it a little bit on Saturday. On Saturday I felt like my pace was good, but I was trying too hard. “That was the worst weekend I’ve ever had in racing, but probably the most useful in some ways,” he analyzed.
Since that triumph in the Netherlands, Piastri has not won again. In fact, from Monza, when the controversial order came, Oscar scored just 57 points and in Italy was where he reaped the most (15) and the mistakes in Baku were added to by the two from Brazil (he crashed in the sprint and was penalized in the main race after a collision with Kimi Antonelli). Instead, Norris, in that same streak that began in the Italian competition, took 115 points and his frequent mistakes were forgotten.
