McLaren<\/a> had changed anything after his Sprint success.<\/p>\n“Everything felt great all weekend so yeah, if it ain\u2019t broke, don\u2019t fix it! It was really good, the team did a great job.<\/p>\n
“We had a little bit of a question mark on which tyres we wanted to use because I did a quick lap on the used set in Q2 \u2013 that threw a little bit of a spanner in the works because we didn\u2019t expect it to be so good. Q3 was really good on the new set so I\u2019m very happy.”<\/p>\n
The race in Qatar is one of the most physically demanding on the calendar for drivers, cars and tyres, with Pirelli limiting the stint of each set to just 25 laps.<\/p>\n
The hot conditions and high G-force corners also put a strain on drivers, with Piastri expecting it to be a challenge.<\/p>\n
“Pretty tough. I think with the two stops as well, we\u2019re probably going to be pushing pretty hard the whole time,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I don\u2019t think it\u2019s going to be as hot as a couple of years ago so hopefully it\u2019s not as bad as that.<\/p>\n
“I\u2019m expecting it to be a pretty tough race. You\u2019re pulling an insane amount of G-force around here multiple times a lap so it\u2019s hard work but incredible fun.”<\/p>\n
When asked if Sunday’s race was win or bust for his title aspirations, Piastri added: “Pretty much! I\u2019ll try my best. I\u2019m starting from the best spot so I\u2019ll try and do some more of what I did today in the Sprint and we\u2019ll see what we can do.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Oscar Piastri is expecting the Qatar Grand Prix “to be a pretty tough race” despite claiming a crucial…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":317365,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-317364","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-motor","11":"tag-motor-sports","12":"tag-motosport","13":"tag-motosports","14":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/317365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}