The McLaren driver will start his second career Italian GP from the front row, right next to his teammate Norris on pole. It was an overall positive for Piastri, who suffered from a couple of small mistakes during Q1: one of his own, as he cut the apex at T1 on his first attempt, and one from his team, as he exited the pits untimely ahead of Verstappen, earning himself an investigation for unsafe release.
Piastri went over his day in the post-qualifying press conference, recalling how close everyone was especially after the first attempts, which had seen him only 0.035s off Norris’s provisional pole.
“I think the car was very strong. The first lap I did in Q3 was solid. A couple of little things to work on, but the second lap just wasn’t as good as it needed to be. A similar story in turn one, and, yeah, that kind of set the tone for the rest of my lap.
“I had a big wheelspin out of turn one, and it was a bit of a mess from there, so, yeah, just need to tidy it up a little bit at the end, but the car was performing well.
“You know, after practice, it certainly wasn’t guaranteed to have this result. I think we very easily felt like we could have ended up in 7th or 8th if we didn’t get it quite right, so to come away on the front row was a very good result,” added the overall satisfied Australian driver.
A key talking topic this weekend so far has been the recently resurfaced Monza track, with drivers mentioning grip issues, as showcased by crashes for Antonelli and Magnussen, as well as plenty of snaps throughout the lap. Piastri admitted that the track conditions have definitely made his job of achieving a good starting position even harder than in other rounds:
“Not so much just to keep them alive, just the tarmac has been quite difficult to judge. It’s had a lot of rain or dirt on it. You know, when you watch the TV shots in some of the corners, it’s basically two black lines from where we’ve been driving, and then the rest is kind of brown.
“So it’s made it like, a little bit difficult, and it’s quite a difficult tarmac, for whatever reason, to drive on, and also for the tyres. We’ve seen a lot of graining throughout practice, so it’s been difficult. I don’t think it’s necessarily been the temperature, but it’s been very, very tough, I think, for everybody to nail a lap this weekend, even with all these attempts at qualifying.”
The former Alpine Academy driver was then asked about the actual race tomorrow, and how can he take his second Grand Prix victory.
“I think the start is always a good opportunity, it’s a long run to Turn 1 here. Obviously, as a team, we need to do a bit of a better job than last week, unless we plan on getting bad starts, just creating a roadblock.
“But, no, that is an opportunity, but there will be more opportunities tomorrow. The strategy is still a bit of a question mark. You know, no-one’s done really more than 10 laps on a set of tyres, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens. So I think it’ll be a pretty interesting one, even after the first lap,” concluded Piastri, already focused on his next goal.
