Oscar Piastri Sends Jab To Lance Stroll - 'Driving Like It Was His First Go-Kart Race'

McLaren driver Oscar Piastri didn't hold back his frustration after Sunday's Italian Grand Prix at Monza. During the final stint of the race, the Australian driver was closing in on the race leader, Charles Leclerc, but found himself 2.6 seconds short of the target.

Piastri revealed that he got caught up with the lapped Lance Stroll which knocked his pace. He explained to the media following the race, as quoted by RaceFans.net:

“I asked basically straight away what pace I needed to do to go and get Charles. And the pace I needed was basically what I did for the first few laps.

“At that point, I was pretty optimistic. [But] I lost a decent amount of time behind Carlos. You had Stroll driving like it was his first go-kart race. I don’t know what went through his brain when he saw his blue flag. That cost another second.

“I needed that stint to be perfect to win that race and those little things are ultimately what cost us a bit of a chance.

“It would have been a long shot anyway but it was certainly not far off from being able to achieve it. I was pushing flat out to try and do it, I couldn’t have gone any faster than that, just came up a bit short.”

Leclerc pulled off his victory by gambling with the one-stop strategy. Speaking about whether this was an option for him, Piastri explained:

“For me, it was a big risk to do that,” he said. “The graining of the tires has been a big topic all weekend.

“In practice, once you got graining, it was basically game over. Even in the first stint on the mediums it was pretty difficult.

“When we made the second stop, for myself, my front-left tire was pretty heavily grained and I was going slower and slower. So it seemed like a sensible decision to pit again.

“I guess nobody really expected the graining to clear up on Charles’ [tyres], from what I heard. So, in hindsight, clearly stopping once was the right thing to do. But from that point in the race with all the information that we’d gathered through the weekend, it seemed incredibly risky.”

He concluded:

“That’s kind of the blessing and the curse of leading the race, or being at the front. The guys behind you can react to what you do.

“For Charles, if he did a two-stop, he would have locked in third. And if he did a one-stop and fell off the cliff, he still would have finished third.

“But, of course, he pulled the one-stop off and Ferrari look like the hero today. Obviously it hurts at the moment, but I think in the moment it was the right thing to do.”