After the accident that occurred during the formation lap at his home GP in Melbourne, for Oscar Piastri it will be a great opportunity to take part in his first race of the season this weekend in Shanghai for the Chinese GP. An event, which coincides with the first Sprint, in which the McLaren Australian wanted to highlight some of the characteristics that the Asian circuit will present during the press conference: “I believe that here it will be much easier to exploit many more braking zones, many more slow corners – he commented – I think instead that on faster circuits or with very long straights, then yes, it will be difficult”.
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Piastri will therefore get back into the game after a 2025 that saw him as the leader of the world championship standings at mid-season, only to then face a continuous crisis of results that opened the doors to the world title for his teammate Lando Norris: “I am ready to get back on track. It certainly won’t be my favorite moment of my career, but I’m still thinking back to some of the events of last Sunday regarding what happened, and I tried to learn as much as possible. I think that up until that point, similarly to Melbourne last year, during practice and qualifying we did things well. We realized the plan we had wasn’t necessarily the best, but I think at least we executed it well. There were definitely positives to consider during last weekend, but I think compared to last year my score is only two points lower, even if it’s much more embarrassing. I’m only two points lower than 12 months ago”.
The #81 then focused on Mercedes‘ dominance in Melbourne and the impressive gap given by the Anglo-German manufacturer’s drivers to the reigning world champion: “Did it shock me? Yes and no. I think the race was chaotic for the first 10 laps and very different from those we’ve ever seen in F1, very different from the traditional way of racing. Once everyone settled down, the situation seemed more like what we’ve seen in the past. Regarding the gap from Mercedes, I think we still had many things we wanted to try to resolve in the race, not optimizing things as much as we could or probably should have. I think it paints a slightly pessimistic picture, but we delude ourselves that Mercedes is incredibly strong. We hope we can get closer. I don’t think we’ll be able to beat them over the race distance, but I think we can get much closer than we did in Melbourne. The distribution – he added – will still be an important factor. I think we have several issues with harvesting and there will be other things to manage. Probably there won’t be much lifting, nor slopes and super clipping for anyone. The final straight is incredibly long and you can drain the battery very quickly, so there are still other challenges to face. I think we learned a lot from Melbourne. The sensitivity to some of these aspects will be less here, but it will still be very, very challenging. We’ll find out, but I think we can definitely get closer”.
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