Stella backs Oscar Piastri to respond after heartbreaking Australian Grand Prix crash
Oscar Piastri's day ended before it began at his hometown race, but he has been backed to rebound quickly.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has backed Oscar Piastri to bounce back from his pre-race crash at his home circuit, emphasising his driver’s mental strength.
Piastri sent his car into a spin at the exit of Turn 4 on one of his reconnaissance laps to the grid, wiping out the front-right side of his car and ruling himself out of his hometown race.
Andrea Stella explains Oscar Piastri Australian Grand Prix crash
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The Melburnian was naturally disappointed at such a turn of events, placing blame on himself as well as a burst of power unit energy he was not expecting out of the corner.
Teammate Lando Norris went on to finish fifth on Sunday, with Piastri likely to have been among that area of the standings too as Mercedes and Ferrari went clear of the rest.
Piastri offered an apology to his supporters and added that “a scenario like that just shouldn’t happen”, but his team boss offered words of support after the chequered flag, while explaining some of the technical factors which may have contributed to such an incident.
“Oscar, very unfortunate, definitely a tough moment for him in front of the Australian crowd,” Stella told PlanetF1.com and other media in Melbourne.
“But Oscar, let me spend a word from this point of view, is a very tough guy mentally. He will use all this to get even more concentrated and determined, starting from China.
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“So, we will make sure that we all face this in a united way. We are a team in any situation that may involve any of our team, when it comes to the circumstances, what we observe, I think, is fundamentally three factors: the cold tyres that fall when the wheel spin starts. It starts in a very sudden way.
“These compounds with 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.
“When we look at the behaviour of the power unit, it’s sort of expected to happen like that, but it is not something that you would do unless it’s, which I understand is the case, sort of some requirements that you need to meet in terms of how you deploy your torque.
“When 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 torque deployment point of view.”
Additional reporting by Mat Coch
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