All this happened while the Australian held a 31-point lead in the drivers’ championship over Lando Norris.<\/p>\n
Piastri hinted that the controversy of the previous round may have played a role in the poor weekend in Baku<\/a>.<\/p>\n At Monza, Max Verstappen was a runaway leader while Norris was comfortably second and Piastri a few seconds behind in third.<\/p>\n Late in the race and needing to make a pit stop for both drivers, McLaren made the decision to pit Piastri first and then Norris after.<\/p>\n Piastri’s stop was perfect, but an agonisingly slow stop for Norris meant the Australian was able to overtake him with less than 10 laps remaining in the grand prix.<\/p>\n Piastri, who held a season-high 34-point lead in the championship, was ordered by McLaren to hand the position back to Norris.<\/p>\n “So I don’t really get what’s changed here, but if you really want me to do it then I’ll do it,” Piastri protested during in the race, before ceding the position.<\/p>\n That moment trimmed Piastri’s lead down to 31 points and became one of the season’s most talked-about moments.<\/p>\n In the aftermath, Piastri said McLaren’s decision was fair, but on the Beyond The Grid Podcast the Australian said it was one of many things that he believes contributed to his horror weekend in Baku a fortnight later.<\/p>\n Piastri set for test of ‘character’<\/a><\/p>\n Oscar Piastri will have to show “character” after his recent F1 disappointments says his manager, former Australian ace Mark Webber.<\/p>\n “Ultimately [it’s] a combination of quite a few things,” Piastri said.<\/p>\n “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 pit stops.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n “We had an engine problem in FP1 that kind of unsettled things a bit, and then I was driving not that well. We were on C6 tyres [Pirelli’s softest compound] that weekend, which are notoriously tricky to handle. There were just a lot of little things that eventually kind of added up.<\/p>\n “Baku was the perfect storm of quite a few things which obviously was a pretty terrible weekend.<\/p>\n “There’s no beating around the bush. That’s the worst weekend I’ve had in racing.”<\/p>\n The Australian added that his weekend in Baku was also “useful”, stating that he was able to learn a lot from his experience.<\/p>\n Stream End Game with Tony Armstrong on ABC iview<\/a><\/p>\n Tony Armstrong tackles Australia’s overdue reckoning with racism in sport with the help of some of its biggest sports stars.<\/p>\n Piastri has not stood on the podium since that day in Monza, after finishing in the top three 14 times in the 16 grands prix to that point.<\/p>\n He is also yet to finish ahead of Norris or Verstappen in a grand prix since then.<\/p>\n Piastri was denied the chance to finish on the podium in Brazil after being handed a controversial 10-second penalty for a collision with Mercedes driver Kimi Antonelli, despite several in the paddock believing the Australian was not wholly responsible for the crash<\/a>.<\/p>\n Piastri is now 24 points behind Norris with three rounds \u2014 or three grands prix, one sprint \u2014 remaining in the season.<\/p>\n The margin is Norris’s largest lead in the drivers’ championship this season.<\/p>\n