Andrea Stella: Oscar Piastri Australia crash shows extent of ‘aggressive’ new F1 power units

McLaren’s Andrea Stella says Oscar Piastri’s “unfortunate” crash in Australia is indicative of the aggression of the new F1 power units.

Piastri crashed out of his home race on his way to the grid, losing his McLaren on an exit kerb at Turn 4 and hitting the concrete wall lining the circuit.

Oscar Piastri Australia crash linked to aggressive F1 power unit behaviour

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One of the McLaren drivers was knocked out before the race even started, with local hero Oscar Piastri making a mistake and hitting the barriers.

Uninjured in the accident, Piastri was shown disconsolately walking back to the paddock before addressing the media to explain that he had been caught out by an unexpected peak in power.

“We had a couple of things going on,” he told the media, including PlanetF1.com, in Melbourne.

“I think the first part I want to stress is that there is certainly a big element of that was me.

“Cold tyres. I have used that exit kerb every lap of the weekend, but I didn’t have to.

“At the same time, I had about 100 kilowatts extra power that I didn’t expect, which is not insignificant.

“I think the difficult part to take is everything was working normally. It’s just the function of how the engines have to work with the rules.

“It’s that part that’s difficult to accept. It would almost be easier in some ways if we just said there’s cold tyres and I was optimistic, but when you add in another factor like that it always is more difficult to take.”

Piastri’s wasn’t the first crash of the weekend in which a driver was caught out by unexpected behaviour. Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli smashed his W17 in a crash during FP3, leaving his team up against it to get the car repaired in time for qualifying.

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During qualifying itself, Max Verstappen lost control of his Red Bull RB22 on approach to Turn 1 and flew off into the barriers, leaving him facing a back-of-the-grid starting position.

Such incidents, Stella said, show that the F1 teams all have work to do to fully get to grips with the power units and ensuring predictable behaviour of the cars.

“Here, I may be speculating a bit because the information I have is only related to Oscar, and I can’t necessarily infer that the incidents – uncharacteristic incidents, I would say, especially for Verstappen – I’m not sure if it has to do with the power unit or not,” he said.

“Certainly, when it comes to Kimi Antonelli, he also lost the car in a place in which there’s a lot of torque coming while the car is still subject to lateral load.

“I think it requires a little bit of attention in terms of associating it with the regulations, necessarily.

“Certainly, these power units can be quite aggressive when they release all the power. We talk about 1000 horsepower coming all together, and when the tyres may be a little bit on the cold side, or if this power comes in an unpredictable way, as it happened to Oscar, then it can become very tricky.

“So I don’t want to be here saying I have an easy solution. But I’m here saying we should look into the regulations. These accidents were not a near miss.

“They are very material indication that there’s work to do. So we should do this work as the F1 community.”

With Piastri kicking off the season with a heartbreaking retirement even before starting the race, coupled with the double disappointment of it being his home event, Stella said he’s confident his driver will bounce back strongly.

“Oscar was very unfortunate; it was definitely a tough moment for him in front of the Australian crowd,” he said.

“Let me spend a word from this point of view, he is a very tough guy mentally.

“He will use all this to get even more concentrated and determined, starting from China.

“So we will make sure that we all face this in a united way.

“We are a team in any situation that may involve anybody of our team.”

Piastri had been the victim of several contributing factors coming into alignment, Stella said, saying such spikes in power may have been visible during testing, but without the addition of environmental factors.

“When it comes to the circumstances, what we observed, I think, is fundamentally three factors: the cold tyres that fall when the wheel spin starts. It starts in a very sudden way,” he said.

“This compounds with him being on a kerb. It’s a kerb that he has used pretty much every single lap.

“Kerbs don’t make this easier, though, when the tyres are cold and this farther compounds with an element that doesn’t make it easier again, which is the fact that, with these oscillations and following the shift, there’s extra torque, let’s say, that when we look at the behavior of the power unit, is sort of expected to happen like that, but it is not something that you would do unless it’s sort of requirements that you need to meet in terms of how you deploy your torque.

“In testing, we might have seen some similar circumstances, but we didn’t have the combination of cold tyres and the kerb, which aggravated the fact that you may have these inconsistencies from a power deployment point of view.

“Well, power deployment is not correct. I would say torque deployment in grip-limited phases.”

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