Azerbaijan Grand Prix: Oscar Piastri says McLaren ‘very aligned’ on approach to title fight

Piastri said McLaren’s decision to reverse the order of the cars was made because of the team’s sequence of decisions leading up to the pit stops.

Norris had been the lead McLaren all race, but the team decided to stop Piastri first rather than Norris, against normal convention.

Piastri’s stop went cleanly, but Norris lost four seconds at his because of a problem fitting his left front wheel. That led to Norris losing second place.

Because the team had made the decision to stop in an unusual order, McLaren decided the right thing to do was to restore the natural order of the race, even though they had agreed beforehand that a pit-stop problem was a natural event of racing that would not necessarily lead to such a call.

Piastri added: “From Monza, there was another factor outside of the slow pit stop, being the order we pitted in. That was a contributing factor to why we swapped.

“That one I’m happy to talk about because it happened. We can’t plan for every scenario but we are very aligned and I respect the team’s decisions and trust they will do their best to make the right one.

“The biggest thing for me from Monza was it was a weekend where I deserved to finish third. I didn’t deserve to finish second because of the pace I had. I was quick at certain points but not quick enough the whole weekend. That is my main takeaway from that.”

Piastri said he “stood by” his remarks made over the radio during the race about slow pit stops being part of racing.

“That is a decision we’ve made, that a slow pit stop is a part of racing,” he said. “In the car, the context wasn’t there about what else had happened in terms of the pit stop sequencing. So it was decided there was another factor for the reasoning in swapping.”