NO-NONSENSE OSCAR PIASTRI LANDS SCATHING ‘GO-KART’ DIG ON LANCE STROLL

Oscar Piastri was not holding back after feeling as though Lance Stroll did him no favours in his Monza quest to chase down Charles Leclerc.

Piastri looked primed to win the Italian Grand Prix, only for Ferrari to throw a major curveball on home soil by committing to the one-stop strategy. That left Piastri on a mission to hunt down and pass Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc.

Oscar Piastri delivers scathing Lance Stroll ‘go-kart’ dig

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher and Sam Cooper

Piastri would pick off Sainz, but with eight laps to go, 11.6 seconds was the gap to Leclerc, Piastri ultimately falling 2.664s short as Leclerc sent the tifosi into raptures.

And Piastri said he encountered some not “very helpful” drivers along the way in that pursuit, pointing the finger at Aston Martin driver Stroll specifically for costing him “a couple of seconds”.

Not mincing his words, Piastri claimed Stroll – the last of the classified runners in P19 – “was driving like he was in his first go-kart race”.

Asked by the Formula 1 website if he really believed he could eliminate that gap to Leclerc, Piastri replied: “I thought it would be tough, but I thought it would be possible.

“With the pace I had at the start, I think I was catching nearly two seconds a lap.

“Had a few people that weren’t very helpful. Stroll was driving like he was in his first go-kart race, so that cost a couple of seconds.

“Just a bit painful. But I think we pretty much needed everything to go right on the last set of hards and just ultimately wasn’t quite enough.”

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While the one-stop proved to be the way to go, Piastri said it would have been “incredibly risky” for McLaren to try it. Tyre graining around the resurfaced Monza track proved a major talking point for the race weekend, with Piastri claiming it was a complete surprise that Leclerc managed to work through that phase and come out the other side.

Asked by media including PlanetF1.com how seriously he considered the one-stop, Piastri replied: “Clearly not as seriously as I needed to.

“I think, for me, it was a big risk to do that. You know, the graining of the tyres 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.

“And, yeah, when we made the second stop, for myself, my front left tyre was pretty heavily grained and, you know, 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, from what I heard.

“So yeah, 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.

“And that’s kind of the blessing and the curse of leading the race or, you know, being at the front, full stop. The guys behind you can react to what you do. And 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. Yeah, obviously it hurts at the moment, but I think in the moment it was the right thing to do.”

2024-09-02T18:11:26Z dg43tfdfdgfd