Janne Palomäki
McLaren hopes that Oscar Piastri was wasting his entire error in Azerbaijan, writes Janne Palomäki.
Oscar Piastri now needs support. Aop
McLaren wins the manufacturers’ world championship.
The title was practically certain at the beginning of the F1 summer holiday. The mathematical confirmation will be less than two weeks later in Singapore.
McLaren took the team championship last season. It was never the main goal of this season.
The general public, sponsors and television channels follow only the World Championships for drivers. Its McLaren was last won in 2008, when young Lewis Hamilton brought the trophy to the futuristic headquarters of Woking.
It will be 17 years old this fall.
McLaren’s superiority on the track is so great that only this year’s championship has long been considered as a camper between Oscar Piastr and Lando Norris.
Maybe that’s it.
However, the truth is that McLaren has now twice in a row collapsed into the wrong depot stop.
The same two races have turned into Max Verstappen winnings.
While at the beginning of September, Piastr’s lead to the Dutchman was 104 points, it will only be 69 points at the end of September.
Verstappen won the September F1 series with a full 50 points. Norris got 24 points for two races, Piastri only 15.
If the pace remained like this, The Dutch needs four more races to skip the Piastr World Championship leadership.
There are seven GP weekends left.
Of course, McLaren hopes that all the problems are now concentrated in September.
Particularly worrying was that Piastrin’s 34 -race tube from arrival on the checkered flag broke into the Baku Vitosmut.
“This was a difficult weekend overall,” Andrea Stella, the team manager, told Sky Sports.
-The time run did not go well and we could not improve the situation in Sunday’s race. In fact, it got even worse because of the Oscar’s crash, Stella continued.
Andrea Stella hopes for the rest of the season to go smoothly again. Aop
The situation was mainly comic. Piastri had already nervous in the starting grid where he First he took the backup departure and then stuck on his car, let all the other drivers pass by.
After that, the race was over. In the fifth, he tried to acknowledge his slower, but McLaren didn’t turn anywhere.
Aussi banged its beak above the opposite safety fence.
– The grip was really bad, but I should have known it. I really do not blame anyone but myselfPiastri acknowledged.
The team manager Stella did not want to hang his 24-year-old star drivers too much.
– Errors are not typical for Oscar. Hope they just gathered in this race now and the rest of the season will go purely again.
– Oscar is probably the most reliable driver, so hopefully this was just a single exception to him.
However, it is not just about Piastr. Norris, the second in the World Championship, could have reduced his teammate’s 31-point lead.
He did it, but the seventh place only produced six extra points.
– We have to say that we did not give Lando a fast enough car so that he could run away from traffic, Stella turned responsibility to himself.
Norris drove long stretches behind Yuki Tsunodan and Liam Lawson. However, he couldn’t get past.
– We should be able to do better. We reset this and try again in Singapore.
Finally, Norris’s race was ruined by a depot tat for more than four seconds. Without it, he would have easily been fifth in the race.
– I think the most important lesson about this was that the car was not fast enough.
McLaren hopes that the talk about Verstappen’s return to the World Cup can be forgotten as soon as possible.
Max Verstappen has creeped into the World Cup. EPA / AOP
The Dutch himself admitted that he had lost his grip on the World Cup gold a couple of months ago.
Perhaps a little surprisingly, he had changed his opinion on the narrow streets of Baku.
– Seven races left and the difference is still 69 points. That’s a lot, Verstappen wondered.
– in practice Everything must go perfectly from my side and besides that I need good luck. Still, it’s really difficult.