Oscar Piastri’s ‘deserved’ penalty summed up McLaren’s Canadian GP misery

Oscar Piastri received a 10-second penalty for causing a collision with Alex Albon at the Canadian Grand Prix. It was a race which proved challenging for McLaren as a collective.

Team principal Andrea Stella had no complaints about Piastri’s penalty, admitting that it was a “deserved” punishment from the stewards. Piastri crossed the line P11, while Lando Norris retired with a gearbox problem.

Oscar Piastri penalty and Lando Norris issues hurt McLaren

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McLaren took a gamble by starting the Canadian Grand Prix on intermediate tyres with drizzle in the air. That did allow Lando Norris to shoot into the lead, though Piastri lost a position. Quickly, on a drying track, McLaren’s decision backfired, however.

After early pit-stops for both drivers to return to slicks, Piastri was hit with a 10-second penalty as he punted Alex Albon’s Williams into retirement at the hairpin.

“In terms of Oscar’s incident, the stewards penalised the incident and this is deserved,” Stella admitted in reflection on the race.

“I don’t think there’s much more to add.

“It was a misjudgement. Obviously there must have been some pressure as well to try and recover, but ultimately, this was penalised by the stewards and was also penalised by the fact that the car was damaged.

“In hindsight, definitely the points would have been possible, but we didn’t have a pace that could have allowed us to recover.

“[Franco] Colapinto [who finished sixth], I’m not sure that was possible in terms of catching up after the issues we had at the start.

“The car was damaged, so Oscar lost some performance.”

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Norris’ fortunes were not much better in Montreal.

The reigning world champion was forced to park his McLaren after a gearbox issue rubber-stamped a frustrating day.

“On Lando, we had two issues,” said Stella.

“One was that the car started to overheat, therefore we needed to add a stop relatively early, which was to clean the radiators. So I’m not sure how much this was clear on television, or for you following the race, but the stop that we did with Lando was actually because of reliability problems.

“Then there was a gearbox problem, which is independent of this overheating. This gearbox problem would have happened in all cases.”

Stella admitted that Sunday was therefore “not Lando’s day.”

“If there’s a day to have all the problems in a single distance, then that was the day,” Stella concluded.

McLaren is now 113 points behind Constructors’ Championship leader Mercedes.

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