Oscar Piastri breaks silence after crash as McLaren driver forced to retire | F1 | Sport
Oscar Piastri has made his bitter disappointment clear after breaking his silence following a dramatic crash on the opening lap of the Australian Grand Prix. The McLaren driver, who crashed out on his home race last year when challenging for the lead, slammed into the side of the wall on the formation lap just a few minutes after leaving the pit lane, 40 minutes before lights out.
“We had a bit of an issue out of the pits with no battery basically,” Piastri told Sky Sports F1. “Then, with the actual crash, there was a combination of a couple of things – there was a large element of just me with cold tyres, clipped the exit kerb, but I also had 100kW more power than expected.
“You put all of those together and it ends in the result we got. Obviously just disappointing and a scenario that shouldn’t be happening.”
Piastri elaborated further in a chat with the BBC and said: “I’m feeling pretty disappointed obviously. It was a situation that shouldn’t happen, we need to review a bit further on what exactly happened.
“A combination of a few things like cold tyres, probably being a bit optimistic on the kerb on the first lap, but also I had 100 kilowatts more power than what I expected which is not insignificant.
“I think if you put all of those together, even if you have one or two of those things then you can manage it, but when you put all of them together it caught me by surprise. I mean just try and learn as much as I can. It’s clearly been an interesting race, so just try and learn what I can.”
McLaren chief Zak Brown said during the race: “We’ve not seen anything on the data so far and he didn’t say anything on the radio, so we’ll do a post-mortem after the race and see what happened.
“For now we’ve got to focus on the car we have in the race and get the excitement level back up because that is definitely disappointing for Oscar in his home race. I’m sure he’ll be sore about that one for a while, but these race car drivers know how to recover quickly, so definitely not the way you want to get started – but we’ll be back.”
McLaren teammate Lando Norris had better fortunes in Melbourne but admitted the team needed to improve to close the gap to Mercedes and Ferrari. “We finished where we deserved to,” Norris told Sky Sports. “I think it was quite clear that the Red Bull was quicker. Max came from last and almost beat us.
“Not the best race, in terms of pace but we struggled with some things on the car in the beginning. We made some tweaks and that certainly improved things. We are nowhere near where we need to be, clearly.
“But probably more so from a car perspective today. We are a long way off. We have a lot of work to do. We [Norris and Oscar Piastri] were running the same car.”
