Oscar Piastri’s slip-up on the 30th anniversary of his home Australian Grand Prix might take 30 years to overcome.
The Melburnian didn’t even make it to the start of Sunday’s 58-lap race, crashing his McLaren on the formation lap to the grid.
Oscar Piastri’s car sits abandoned after he crashed out on a warm-up lap.Credit: Joe Armao
Fresh off his breakout season in the world championship last year, when he won seven grands prix and led the title chase for the majority of the season before finishing third, we explain what happened as his race ended before it even started.
First signs of trouble
The pit lane opens for 10 minutes half an hour before the race starts. This allows drivers to do an “out-lap” – so they can warm up the cars’ tyres and brakes before the formation lap and the race proper.
When Piastri inched towards Albert Park’s first corner on that very lap, his car’s battery did not deliver the expected power. His rear wheels spun aggressively out of the turn at low speed.
Piastri was quick to radio his team on the run between turns two and three, alerting McLaren that he had a battery deployment issue.
He short-shifted between gears to mitigate any potential loss of traction from, in F1-speak, a torque spike. That means the full power of Piastri’s engine would deploy instantaneously rather than in a linear fashion.
Disaster at turn four
Piastri took turn three at a slow, cautious pace. But he put his foot down at turn four, his car riding the outside kerb aggressively before pirouetting on cold tyres into a 180-degree spin, the right-hand side of his car clouting the outside barrier on the run to turn five.
The circuit’s medical car was deployed to assess Piastri’s condition, but the Australian was able to extract himself from his McLaren and returned to the pit lane via a marshal’s scooter, his helmet remaining on, in no mood to discuss his home heartbreak.
The fallout
With McLaren aghast as its lead driver in Melbourne crashed out before he could take up his fifth place on the grid, McLaren CEO Zak Brown was initially at a loss for answers.
“We’ve not seen anything on the data so far or the radio,” Brown said.
“We’ll do a post-mortem after the race. For now, we’ve got to focus on the car we’ve got in the race [Lando Norris].
“[Piastri] will be sore about that one for a while, but he’s a race car driver who knows how to recover quickly. He’ll be back.”
When Norris asked what had happened to his teammate, he was told over team radio: “he lost it on the exit kerb at turn four, doing a shift”.
Sky Sports analyst and former F1 driver Anthony Davidson felt, on initial analysis, that both Piastri’s car and its operator were to blame.
“There’s clearly some level of driver error as well,” the Briton said.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
