Oscar Piastri’s weekend in Mexico was one to remember. It started with promising free practice sessions, continued with disastrous qualifying, and ended with an impressive uphill race.
Free Practice
Despite Friday at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez starting in a disruptive way featuring several red flags, the dedicated Pirelli tyre test brought back some optimism in the McLaren garage. Both cars performed relatively well with the prototype compounds and Oscar Piastri seemed to be more confident than his teammate despite being wary of the Ferrari threat. Looking back at the two practice sessions the Australian driver stated that from his point of view, McLaren still incurs a deficit against the Italian team in terms of race pace.
“I felt quite good and I think the changes we made in the second session improved the feeling with the car, so I’m happy. It was interesting to do some testing with the tyres for next season, and we learned some useful lessons from that. We looked quite competitive and I think we’re in a good position for tomorrow.” – Oscar Piastri after the first two practice sessions.
The remaining hour-long session on Saturday gave each driver time to work on their cars and make the last adjustments before qualifying. Oscar Piastri emerged as the man to beat after setting an impressive time of 1:16.492s 10 minutes before the end of the session. Running as the fastest driver on track, Piastri held the 59-milliseconds over Lando Norris through the chequered flag. At the end of the last session of free practice, the first 9 drivers were all within a one-second margin. This provided the premises for some interesting qualifying sessions.
Qualifying drama
Piastri’s side of the garage went into qualifying with a positive mindset. After all, the timings seemed at least worthy of a fight for pole position. However, nothing went as planned.
The first run saw Piastri on Medium tyres end up only in eighth place. A replay later showed Piastri locking up on his flying lap, which explained why he was down the order. With seven minutes to the end of the session, the Australian dropped down to the danger zone. Things did not improve for Oscar Piastri, as his lap time was deleted for track limits with just five minutes to go.
There seemed to be nothing that Oscar could do to improve his lap times and, in the end, he was shockingly eliminated in Q1 after being the only driver to make all Q3 appearances since the beginning of the season. Piastri, calm and collected as ever, commented on the crucial mistake of Q1: “I just went off in Turn 12, just got beached on the kerb there and that was it. I was very frustrated to make that mistake, I lost about a second so yeah, painful. It’s a tricky circuit, but today wasn’t down to it being tricky, I just made one mistake and that was it.”
Piastri makes a Sunday comeback
On race day there was a buzz in the air. The Ferrari occupied the first two rows with pole position and fourth place, respectively from Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc. Once again Max Verstappen and Lando Norris started very close to each other in second and third place.
Everybody knew that Mexico was going to be quite an interesting race. Oscar Piastri started the race in seventeenth place with a great desire to redeem himself.
An impact between Yuki Tsunoda and Alex Albon brought out the Safety Car on the first couple of laps. Oscar remained glued to his seventeenth place. Once the SC reentered the pits the Australian was able to start his uphill climb. On lap 34 he became the only Medium runner who had yet to stop. However, this didn’t stop him from emerging victorious from a three-way fight with Hamilton and Lawson.
Even though he’s a little behind his teammate, Oscar Piastri has demonstrated time and time again his talent. He has always stood out as calm and collected in a spot where emotions are always running high and on more than one occasion this has proven to be in his favor. This calmness represents the story of a boy who does not respond to the patterns we know, destined, however, to really entertain us. The calm of the strong, of someone who knows who he is and does not want to look like anyone else because he does not have the need to. With just four races left, we can only sit back and see what results he will bring home in Woking.
