The McLaren team principal, Andrea Stella, has backed Oscar Piastri to come back strongly after crashing out of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, pointedly noting that even the seven-time champion Michael Schumacher made similar errors.
Piastri leads the world championship, but endured a shocking weekend in Baku, where the race was won by Max Verstappen from pole. Piastri crashed out in qualifying leaving him ninth on the grid and on Sunday made a false start and the car entered anti-stall, dropping him to the back of the field.
Chasing places on the opening lap he then misjudged the lack of grip in the dirty air from the field ahead as he entered turn five and could not turn-in quickly enough at the 90-degree left-hander and his car went front-first into the barriers, ending his race.
Stella worked with Schumacher at Ferrari as his performance engineer between 2002 and 2006 when Schumacher took three of his seven titles and favourably put Piastri in the same class as the German. “I have worked with multi-champion drivers and in a season, every season, even the most dominant, even one of the best drivers in the history of Formula One, like Michael Schumacher, I have seen events like this,” he said.
“Events in which the most you take away [from the weekend] is the learning, because things become, for some reasons, difficult and as soon as you misjudge the grip available, you get highly punished.”
The errors were notable because Piastri has demonstrated calm and composure this season, making only two other mistakes of real significance, spinning in the wet at Melbourne and his penalty at Silverstone for driving erratically behind the safety car.
Piastri’s failure to finish ended a 34-race points scoring streak in only his third season in F1 and he described the weekend as full of “silly mistakes” and “lapses in judgment”. However, Stella said neither his driver nor the team were concerned. “A one-off weekend in which things don’t go his way and he ultimately had a loss to review. It is no surprise, no exception that we should not be worried about it, because this has happened to pretty much all champions, even the ones with the best track record.”
Piastri was fortunate to an extent that his title rival Lando Norris also qualified poorly, starting in seventh and managing to finish seventh. Norris had been 31 points behind his teammate and reduced the deficit by only six to 25, with seven meetings remaining. While that is a relatively comfortable buffer it could turn in a single race with another DNF.
Stella, who also worked with the world champions Kimi Räikkönen and Fernando Alonso, is convinced Piastri shared the ability to learn from and then compartmentalise the mistakes with the greats and would return strongly in what is still likely to be a closely fought championship run-in.
“I’ve had a chat with Oscar and his mind is already fully functional, processing, he’s already into thinking: ‘That’s what I’ve learned. I look forward to the next one’,” he said. “One of the strongest features of Oscar is how rapidly he learns, how rapidly he improves and how he can come back stronger. That’s why he’s been so successful in every category.
“That’s exactly what will happen in his Formula One career and we will see it in the remainder of the season.”
