How Oscar Piastri moved on from "embarrassing" Australia F1 crash

Oscar Piastri says he has already moved on from his "embarrassing" Australian Grand Prix crash because he has "so many things to focus on" with the new Formula 1 cars.

The McLaren driver suffered heartbreak at his home round in Melbourne last weekend, after crashing on the way to the grid during the sighting lap as a result of an unexpected spike in power from his car.

It followed 12 months on from further disappointment at his home race, when he slid off in wet conditions while battling at the front and slumped to ninth.

Admitting his Albert Park shunt was "embarrassing", he’s taken solace from the fact that the weekend went well up until that point.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said when asked by Crash.net if he’d been able to move on from the disappointment. “I’m ready to get back into it.

“Obviously, it’s certainly not going to be the favourite moment of my career!

“I think I still tried to learn as much as I could from the race. I’m still going through some of the things that happened last Sunday, in terms of what happened during the race. But I tried to learn as much as I could.

“And I think up until that point, in a similar vein to Melbourne last year, through practice, through qualifying, we did things well, we executed the plan we had correctly. We kind of realised maybe the plan we had maybe wasn’t necessarily the best, but we at least executed well.

“So there’s definitely positives to take from last weekend. But I think last year, and the start of last year, we are only two points worse off – even though it’s more embarrassing – than I was at this point 12 months ago.”

Asked how he had spent the last few days he said: “I think there were a lot of things to understand from the weekend in general, understanding how Sunday went so wrong. But I think I understood the factors that went into it pretty quickly, and then focused on all of the things I’ve got to try to do this weekend to be as fast as I can.

“The good thing about coming straight into another race, and the good thing about having so many things to focus on, is it’s pretty easy to shift your focus onto the future."

Mercedes pace was and wasn't a surprise to Piastri

Watching the race from the sidelines at least gave Piastri a chance to learn what he could from how it unfolded.

Asked if he was shocked to see team-mate Lando Norris finish over 50 seconds behind winner George Russell he said: “Yes and no. I think the race was chaos for the first 10 laps, and a very different kind of racing to what we’ve ever had in F1, and I think very different to your kind of traditional way of racing.

“Once everyone settled down, it looked more similar to what we’ve seen previously. I think the gap to Mercedes, I think we still had a lot of things we wanted to figure out in the race, not optimising things as much as we could have, or probably should have.

“I think hopefully it paints a slightly pessimistic picture. But we’re under no illusion that Mercedes is incredibly strong, and we’ve got time to find. Hopefully we can get closer. I don’t think we will be in the fight to beat them over a race distance, but I think we can get a lot closer than what we did in Melbourne.”

Piastri echoed Norris by admitting that he hasn’t yet come to terms with how the car is performing, given the obvious attention on the power unit and how to manage it.

“There’s been some head-scratching at certain points,” he said.

“I think we’ve probably not even spoken about the car that much, because we’re so focused on how to get the most out of the power unit.

"I think one of the things we learned was the kind of difference you can make by optimising the power unit is by order of magnitude much bigger than anything you can do with the set-up of the car.

“Yes, you can help, but I think probably a large element of George’s competitiveness, even compared to Kimi in the qualifying laps, if you look at the straightline speed of the two cars it’s very different.

"I think there’s at least a few tenths, probably closer to half a second if you get that run, and in car set-up there’s maybe a tenth or two if you really turn things around.

“I think it’s just understanding what you need from the car to get the most out of the power unit. But so much of our time is taken up by finding those big gains from the power unit, that anything we do with the car, unless it’s undriveable, we’ll deal with that later.”