Oscar Piastri hasn’t been the same driver since Monza, when he had to let Lando Norris back past after his slow pitstop. Has it got into Oscar’s head the assumption McLaren are favouring Lando over him? Lando has been nurtured by McLaren through all the junior formula, after all. – Rob
It’s worth answering this quite extensively, because it’s an important topic that seems to have gathered momentum in the minds of some fans.
Piastri has dealt with this question of favouritism already. In Austin, he was asked directly whether he was happy there was none in the team. He replied: “I’m very happy that there’s no favouritism or bias.”
McLaren Racing chief executive officer Zak Brown has also addressed it. In a BBC Sport interview in Austin, he said: “Nonsense.”
Brown then expanded on the specifics of the two races that seem to have led to this becoming an issue – Hungary and Italy.
He acknowledged: “You’re right, it appears the couple incidents that have happened most recently have kind of fallen Lando’s way.”
But he also detailed why those races were not examples of deliberate favouritism.
Brown said the Hungarian Grand Prix, where Norris beat Piastri by switching to a one-stop strategy after falling back to fifth on the first lap, was “a free punt, because of how the race was playing out”.
On the pit wall at the time, neither he nor team principal Andrea Stella believed it would work.
“I wish Netflix [Drive to Survive] was here now, because you’ll hear the pit-wall conversation,” Brown said.
“Andrea and I were like: ‘This ain’t gonna work.’ But Lando drove brilliantly. And had that been any other track where passing was a little bit easier, I don’t think it would have worked, right? It was just a track that you can’t pass on.”
Of Monza, where McLaren ordered Piastri to cede second place to Norris, who had lost it following the combination of a deliberate reversal of pit-stop order and then a slow pit-stop late in the race, Brown said that was “just like happened in Hungary the year before”, where Norris ceded the win to Piastri.
“If the lead car is prepared to sacrifice their rights to the first call to help his team-mate, who’s actually his number one competitor in the championship, that’s great teamwork,” he said.
“And we did that to protect Oscar, which actually is to the detriment of Lando in an out-and-out race. Then we had the pit-stop issue.
“Everyone thinks we reversed the order because of the pit stop. That actually had nothing to do with it. So the challenge then becomes you almost can’t explain everything all the time, and people jump to conclusions.
“So I understand what it looks like from the outside, but it’s not what’s going on on the inside, and we’re trying so hard to give them equal opportunity and let them race hard.
“I wish everyone recognised more of that. But I’ve definitely come to the conclusion there’s too many fans with too many views, (and) that we’ve just got to be comfortable with how we’re going racing inside McLaren, and that’s what’s most important to us.”
As for what’s going on with Piastri’s performance, it’s not quite as simple as the question suggests. Yes, he had a bad weekend in Baku – crashing three times and jumping the start. Both McLaren drivers struggled there, and while Piastri seemed less comfortable than Norris, he was not massively slower.
In Singapore, Piastri qualified two places ahead, before the incident at the first corner, for which Norris received unspecified consequences in Austin.
But it’s true Piastri was off the pace in Austin and Mexico. Piastri and the team say this was down to the car needing to be driven differently in the specific conditions there.
Stella said that in a post-qualifying review in Mexico they “extracted some important information in terms of how the car wants to be driven in these special low-grip conditions that we are facing here in Mexico, similar to Austin”.
He added: “It looks like in this regime you have to drive the car in a way that adapts to the fact that the car slides a lot and can slide and produce lap time. And this is not necessarily the way in which Oscar feels naturally that he is producing lap time.
“So, we identified a few things that we could do with the car and a few things that he could do with the driving.”
Piastri said: “It’s certainly been a learning experience, that’s for sure. For some reason, the last couple of weekends have required a very different way of driving.
“I’ve needed something very different the last couple of weekends from what’s worked well for me in the last 19 races. Trying to wrap my head around why has been a bit of a struggle.”
