Piastri calls the error that cost him a Baku podium “a bit weird”

Oscar Piastri described the late-race error that cost him a podium at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix as “a bit weird”. Following the second safety-car restart, the McLaren driver was running third, having been overtaken by Max Verstappen at the first restart, when Isack Hadjar began to put him under pressure.

Trying to defend on the inside into Turn 1, the Australian suffered a huge lock-up and ran straight on. He dropped from third to 15th, the penultimate position in a tightly packed field. “I need to look, because it was a bit weird just locking up both fronts instantly like that,” he said.

Piastri said he did not believe he had done “anything spectacular”. He explained that he had taken an unusual line while defending his position, without ruling out that he may have driven over a crown in the road, while saying the incident had taken him by surprise. In his view, fourth place was potentially still possible, although he stressed the difference between a possibility and the result actually achieved.

Once Verstappen had passed him, Piastri did not think he would be able to get back ahead. He did believe it would have been interesting to see whether he could have kept Hadjar behind, although he acknowledged that it would probably have been difficult. His medium tyres were heavily flat-spotted, and he did not feel as competitive on them as he had on the soft compound.

Piastri still outperformed his team-mate Lando Norris in Baku and matched his best qualifying result of the season with third place. The 25-year-old, who has struggled throughout the season with the 2026-spec machinery, could have secured his first podium since Miami.

He did not necessarily consider the car more comfortable, but said he had been able to extract more lap time from it. He also indicated that he had been better able to understand the direction to take with his driving. “Apart from one moment in the race, I feel like it’s been a weekend much more at the level I expect from myself,” he said, while describing it as painful to have nothing to show for it yet.

For Piastri, the adaptation comes down to how these cars need to be driven. He compared the previous cars, in which driving at 99% while looking after the tyres a little was, in his view, the fastest way, with the current machinery. With the latter, he feels he has to be at 101% all the time or lose a great deal of lap time. He believes he was able to reach that 100 or 101% level more easily in Baku, without that necessarily meaning greater comfort. He added that he had learned some interesting lessons from the weekend, while stressing that the learning process was continuing.