Oscar Piastri opened up about his disastrous F1 Baku GP weekend, calling it the “worst weekend I’ve ever had in racing.” The McLaren driver suffered multiple crashes and unforced errors in Azerbaijan back in mid-September. Speaking recently on a F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast, Piastri revealed that Monza’s team orders from the previous race weekend were still playing in his mind during Baku.
Piastri’s F1 Baku GP started poorly with a reliability issue during practice. He then proceeded to crash during qualifying, which left him P9 on the starting grid. On Sunday, a botched start caused him to shuffle to the back of grid before ultimately crashing half a lap later.
Monza aftermath still fresh
When asked what went wrong during his Baku GP weekend, Piastri admitted the previous race in Monza was still affecting him. At the Monza GP, Piastri was controversially asked to swap positions with Lando Norris after his teammate emerged behind him due to a delayed pitstop. The incident sparked discussions after many questioned whether a botched pitstop should have triggered the position swap.
Speaking about his Baku GP performance, Piastri acknowledged Monza’s lingering impact while also identifying other contributing factors: “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.”
Multiple factors combined
Beyond the Monza situation, Piastri’s Baku GP troubles began on Friday practice. The McLaren driver struggled with his driving and was not satisfied with his own performance heading into qualifying: “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.”
Piastri’s Baku GP qualifying session ended with a costly crash that left him starting ninth on the grid. Speaking about the lead up to his crashes on Saturday and Sunday, Piastri emphasized his engine problem during FP1. The technical issue compounded his struggles to find rhythm at Baku.
“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.”
The difficult C6 tyres added another layer of complexity to Piastri’s weekend. The compound proved tricky to handle around the tight street circuit: “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.”
A perfect storm
Reflecting on his Baku GP disaster, Piastri described it as a convergence of multiple problems. The combination of mental factors, technical issues, and driving errors created the worst weekend of his career. “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….” Piastri stated.
Despite the severity of his Baku GP weekend struggles, Piastri found value in the experience. He believes the lessons learned from that weekend may prove beneficial in the long term: “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.”
Perspective from other drivers’ struggles
The McLaren drew comfort from knowing other drivers have experienced terrible weekends like his Baku GP: “[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.”
Every driver faces disastrous moments throughout their career according to Piastri. Understanding this universal truth helped him process his Baku GP weekend with better perspective: “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,” he stated.
Applying lessons since Baku
Since the Baku GP, Piastri has raced in Singapore, Austin, Mexico, and São Paulo. While he has struggled for pace against teammate Lando Norris in several of those races, his Baku GP stands out for the sheer volume of mistakes.
The McLaren driver has been overtaken by Norris in the championship standings following those difficult races. However the lessons learned from his Baku GP disaster continue to shape his approach as the season enters its final three races.
