Oscar Piastri has lauded the Monaco Grand Prix as the best weekend of his career after turning around troubled practice form into a points finish.
Piastri had looked down and out throughout practice, lapping on average 0.698 seconds behind teammate Lando Norris and looking destined to qualify near the back of the pack around a circuit that does little to facilitate overtaking.
But the Aussie rookie executed a stunning turnaround in time for qualifying to put his car 11th, lapping just 0.018 seconds slower than the sister car.
He turned that position into a pointscoring 10th during the race, just the second top-10 finish of his fledgling career.
Piastri was still in a buoyant mood speaking to reporters at the Spanish Grand Prix, where he described his Monaco turnaround as an important one for his season.
“I think as a whole for the weekend it was probably the most complete on Saturday and Sunday,” he said.
“Qualifying was very, very close to Lando, and then the race I think was probably the cleanest race we’ve had for myself and the team.
“All the other races have had either mechanical issues, damage in Saudi, food poisoning in Baku, all the red flags in Melbourne.
“Okay, with the rain it wasn’t that normal, but in terms of a result and events during the race that happened to me, it was the most normal, which was nice to get some experience and just have a clean race.
“From that point of view I think it was definitely a breakthrough.”
The opportunity for a smooth weekend acted as an important temperature-check on Piastri’s rookie progress after a complicated opening run of races that often featured compromising circumstances beyond his control, and the Melburnian said he felt it validated that he was on a strong trajectory.
“I think I’m about where I would have wanted to be,” he said. “I think over one lap, especially at the last few events, it’s been quite close, which has been nice.
“I think throughout the race distances it’s always been a little bit tricky to compare because I’ve always had stuff going wrong, quite frankly.
“I’ve been focusing very much on my personal development and just making sure I extract the most out of myself and having Lando there as a reference is quite useful for that.
“I feel like I’m in a good spot. Just continuing to learn every weekend.”
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has sung Piastri’s praises several times already this season, but even the Italian boss was left impressed by the Aussie’s ability to grasp the weekend at its pivotal moment in Monte Carlo.
“Up until the last session before qualifying he was more than half a second off Lando’s pace, with a bit of head scratching as to how would we go in qualifying,” he said on Sunday night in Monaco. “Instead Q1 was already competitive.
“We have this sense of ‘we have an objective, we go and get it’.
“That seems to be working very well with Oscar right from the start.”
Describing how he managed to find almost 0.7 seconds in the space of a couple of hours between sessions, Piastri put it down to getting comfortable with his McLaren’s unique handling characteristics at the riskiest circuit on the calendar.
“I think it was a little bit of just pushing the limits bit more,” he said. “Some of the limitations we have [with out car], you have to be very confident in the inputs you put in and not second-guess whether you’re going to make the apex.
“You have to be quite certain with that, which in a place like Monaco, where a slight misjudgment in speed can have big consequences, is quite difficult.
“In qualifying I found some more confidence a little bit with the way we set up the car and the track conditions, but it was kind of that I found that confidence and then it’s snowballed into more and more confidence.”
“It kind of just spiralled from there. I was getting bit closer to the walls, taking some more risk as well, so I think it was just little bits everywhere.
“I think getting more up to speed with that in Monaco and just trusting it a bit more was quite a big lap time improvement for what wasn’t actually a massive revelation.”
This weekend Piastri has the luxury of racing at a circuit he knows intimately, having competed in Barcelona in the junior categories and run many laps during private testing in old-model F1 cars, and he’s hopeful it will give him a chance to hit the ground running rather than worry about learning his way around the circuit.
“It’ll be nice,” he said. “It’s more familiar to everybody, I guess, but compared to some of the other places, like Baku, Monaco, Miami, I’m not having to learn the track as well — or, for Baku and Monaco, for example, I’m not having to try and keep it out of the walls as well.”
