McLaren’s Oscar Piastri backed up his front row start in Monaco, as despite picking up damage at turn 1, he was able to bring home his third Formula One podium, finishing P2, 7.152 seconds behind race winner Charles Leclerc.
Having hounded home hero Leclerc for a large part of the race, Piastri eventually started to struggle late on, thanks to the damage picked up from an incident with Carlos Sainz on lap 1.
Knowing how important the start is around the streets of Monaco, both Sainz and Piastri had their elbows out from lights out, which lead to contact in turn 1 on the opening lap.
Sainz’s front left tyre touched the sidepod and floor of Piastri’s McLaren, giving Sainz a puncture and the Australian floor damage.
“Yeah, I mean, it was OK I think for the first half of the race… Towards the end, I think probably a combination of, you know, trying to keep the pace of the race, you know, reasonably quick, plus the floor, yeah, it was just struggling a bit towards the end, but overall pretty happy.”
Thankfully for Sainz, a red flag brought out by a collision between Sergio Perez and Kevin Magnussen on the opening lap meant a restart was in order.
Due to the cars not having passed the first timing line, the order for the restart was the same it had been on the first standing start.
On the second restart, Piastri got a better launch from the line which allowed for him to move to the inside, behind Leclerc but still clearly in front of Sainz.
In the laps that followed, having all made their mandatory tyre change at the red flag, Piastri was aware that he needed to overtake Leclerc on track if he wanted to secure his first Grand Prix win.
“I had an attempt, about 10 or 15 laps in, into Turn 8. We were going pretty slow. I think both Formula One were going slower than Formula Two, so, you know, when you’re going that slow, you’ve got to look at the options.
“But I kind of knew that once I showed my hand in where I was going to try and overtake, that it would probably be wise to look from there, so I managed to get very close in Turn 7 one lap.
“I had to show the nose in Turn 8, but he reacted just quick enough, so after that point, I knew I was…”
Looking ahead to the rest of the season, Piastri has said he is excited about his McLaren team’s performance since the new upgrades were applied.
Piastri’s first race with the upgrades was last time out at Imola whereas his teammate Lando Norris had them for Miami where he secured his first win in F1.
“You know, I think it’s been three very different circuits in the past three races, and we’ve been competitive in all of them.
“Probably we had a very strong weekend there, and you’ve been, let’s say, our car’s never been the strongest in the slow corners, and this weekend we’ve been very good again, so I think we can be confident wherever we go, we don’t have to rely on the highest-speed circuits like we did last year to get a result, which is a very exciting thing to have going forward.”
