Oscar Piastri is searching for “answers” as to why his Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix was so difficult, with the complete lack of pace coming as a “surprise”.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
The Australian qualified seventh but was just 0.092s adrift of Kimi Antonelli in third, in what was a remarkably close battle for the positions on the second row.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
However, come the grand prix, Piastri struggled significantly for outright pace and had to settle for a lonely fifth place.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Concerningly, Piastri finished 25 seconds behind team-mate Lando Norris, with the reigning world champion securing a podium for the Woking-based outfit.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Piastri was left unsure of exactly what caused his race to be so difficult, although he did outline the challenges he faced with tyre grip and extending his stints.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Discussing if he understood what made his race so difficult, Piastri told select media, including RacingNews365: “No, not really. I was trying a lot of different things and running into a lot of different problems.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“So I think we were just struggling a lot with grip and tyre life, obviously. I don’t have any answers at the moment. I’m sure there will be some answers later, but yeah, it was a surprise to struggle so much.”\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
There was a significant performance difference between the two McLarens, with Norris remaining within touching distance of the Mercedes drivers throughout the race.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Asked if his set up was different to Norris’, Piastri replied: “Marginal stuff, but nothing major.”\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
While some laps did feel better for Piastri than others, it came at an immediate cost for the 25-year-old, who is hopeful that McLaren can learn from what went wrong.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“There were a few laps here and there that felt a little bit better, but that normally came at a price a few laps later, so it was just not an easy afternoon at all,” added Piastri.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“All I can hope is that we learn why it was so difficult from that. Obviously, the points we gained were still reasonable, but yeah, we obviously wanted the performance to be a lot stronger than it was.”\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Oscar Piastri is searching for “answers” as to why his Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix was so difficult, with the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":731226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,827,830,828,831,829,826,813,823,825,806,805,824,803,804,822,85],"class_list":["post-741760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-daniel-ricciardo","tag-f1-calendar","tag-f1-live","tag-f1-results","tag-f1-standings","tag-ferrari","tag-formula-1","tag-lewis-hamilton","tag-max-verstappen","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motorsport","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-racing","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741760","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=741760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741760\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/731226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=741760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=741760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=741760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}