Piastri admits Monza team order call unsettled him before disastrous Azerbaijan weekend

Oscar Piastri has admitted that losing out in McLaren's controversial team orders call at the Italian Grand Prix was weighing on his mind during his subsequent disastrous Azerbaijan GP weekend, which ultimately sent his 2025 Formula 1 world championship bid spiraling downwards.

McLaren asked Piastri to hand second place at Monza back to Lando Norris after they had swapped positions due to a pitstop delay for Norris. Piastri acquiesced to the request but noted on team radio that it seemed a change to the previous policy that "a slow pitstop was part of racing."

At the next round in Baku, Piastri suffered multiple setbacks, including a crash in qualifying, a jump start, a first-lap crash in the race, and aggressive driving in practice.

Asked on F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast if he understood the reasons why Azerbaijan had gone so badly for him, Piastri’s first response referenced Monza.

"Ultimately a combination of quite a few things. Obviously the race before that was Monza, which I didn't feel was a particularly great weekend from my own performance, and there was obviously what happened with the pitstops," he replied.

He explained that the Baku weekend was difficult due to multiple factors: "Friday was tough. Things weren't working, I was overdriving. I wasn't very happy with how I was driving and ultimately probably trying to make up for that a little bit on Saturday."

Piastri mentioned several minor factors that contributed to the struggle, including an engine problem in Free Practice 1 and the tricky C6 tyres used that weekend. "There were just a lot of little things that kind of added up," he said, concluding that on Saturday his pace was good but he was "just trying a little too hard."

Piastri called that weekend the worst he had ever had in racing, but noted it was "probably the most useful in some ways."

While Piastri stopped short of blaming the team orders for his mistakes, the prominence of that thought in his answer indicates it had been unsettling at a time when he was already starting to lose confidence in his performance.

Piastri has not won a race since the Dutch GP at the end of August, the round before Italy. He left Zandvoort with a 44-point championship lead over Norris and 104 points clear of Max Verstappen. Six rounds of pace struggles and errors later, beginning with the Monza team orders angst and also featuring the Interlagos crash and penalty last weekend, Piastri goes into the final three events 24 points behind Norris and only 25 ahead of Verstappen.