Piastri says new cars partially to blame for “painful” Australian GP crash

McLaren Formula 1 driver Oscar Piastri has partially blamed his crash on the sighting lap at the Australian Grand Prix on unexpected power from his engine.

The reigning champion team’s defence of its title hasn’t gotten off to the best of starts, with both McLaren drivers only managing to qualify on the third row behind two Mercedes’, a Red Bull and a Ferrari.

McLaren’s weekend then got worse on the sighting lap on Sunday at Albert Park when Oscar Piastri crashed going through Turn 3.

Doing too much damage to start the race, it follows on from his retirement from his home event last year.

“Difficult to expect” additional energy from new cars

Speaking to the media, including Crash.net, during the grand prix, Piastri says he was partially to blame for the crash.

However, he also said he had an unexpected additional 100Kw of energy being deployed at that moment, which made the incident “more painful” to expect.

“Obviously, just disappointed. A scenario like that just shouldn’t happen. Obviously disappointed it did,” he said in response to a question from Crash.

“We had a couple of things going on,” he added.

“I think the first part I want to stress is that there was certainly a big element of it that was me: cold tyres.

“I have used that exit kerb every lap of the weekend, but maybe I didn’t have to.

“At the same time, I had 100Kw of extra power that I didn’t expect, which is not insignificant.

“The difficult part to take there is that everything was working normally.

“It’s just the function of how the engines have to work with the rules.

“That’s the part that’s difficult to expect. It would be easier to say if it was cold tyres and I was a bit too optimistic.

“But when you add in another factor like that, it always is even more painful.”

McLaren clearly starts 2026 on the back foot against its rivals, but Piastri believes the team was “doing a lot of things well” up until Sunday.

“I think up until today, we did a lot of things well,” he said.

“We maybe identified some things we need to change and do a better job at.

“But through practice and qualifying it felt pretty comfortable, as comfortable as it can be in these cars.

“Felt like I was building into it nicely. That element is not too different to 12 months ago. I’m just trying to take the learning from it.”