McLaren's Oscar Piastri says his crash-filled Baku F1 performance was the "worst weekend I had in racing", and hinted that the team's position swap in Monza on the previous race weekend was still playing on his mind.
Piastri was on the back foot in Azerbaijan after being struck by a reliability issue in practice, and then proceeded to suffer a costly crash in qualifying that left him ninth on the grid. A botched start then shuffled the McLaren to the back of the grid on the opening lap, with the Australian crashing half a lap later as he tried to force his way through the field.
While Piastri has since had other difficult outings in which he struggled for pace compared to team-mate Lando Norris, which has seen the Briton usurp him in the championship, Baku stands out for the number of unforced errors that marred his weekend.
When asked on F1's Beyond the Grid podcast what went wrong in Baku, Piastri suggested that the events of the previous race in Monza were still playing on his mind.
At the Italian Grand Prix Piastri was asked to swap places with Norris after the latter emerged behind his team-mate due to a delayed pitstop. As the second McLaren driver in the queue, Piastri was allowed pit order priority to protect against a threat from behind, in the knowledge that it would not endanger Norris' position.
But Piastri questioned whether a botched pitstop should have been covered by that tacit agreement, and discussions took place after the race to address his and his management's concerns.
He now admitted that incident was still fresh on his mind in Baku. But rather than directly holding it responsible, he also addressed other factors behind his erratic Baku performance, including him overdriving to compensate for earlier setbacks.
"Ultimately [it's] a combination of quite a few things," Piastri said on the podcast. "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 in 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.
"I think there was kind of 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, and then I was driving not that well. We were on C6 tyres [Pirelli's new, softest compound] that weekend, which are notoriously tricky to handle. There were just a lot of little things that eventually kind of added up."
It all led to Piastri labelling the weekend as the worst in his career so far: "Ultimately, Baku was the perfect storm of quite a few things. Obviously, it was a pretty terrible weekend, but I think the amount of learning we had from that weekend, from a technical point of view, emotional point of view....
"There's no beating around the bush, that was the worst weekend I've ever had in racing, but probably the most useful in some ways. So, when you can start to look at things like that, normally that helps you out quite a lot.
"[If] you look at some of the names that have had some pretty shocking weekends, or almost unbelievable weekends or races or moments in their career where things have gone wrong; it happens to anyone.
"There's not one person in racing that doesn't have some kind of disastrous story of how a weekend went wrong for them. Looking at it from that perspective does help a lot, but you still need to learn the things you need to learn from weekends like that."
Read and post comments