The Australian endured a disastrous round in Baku back in September, crashing out twice across the weekend in qualifying and the race.

It followed a controversial previous outing at Monza, where Piastri had been asked to yield second place back to teammate Lando Norris following a slow tyre change, despite initially undercutting the Briton.

Speaking on F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast, Piastri outlined how the Baku disaster played out.

“Obviously, the race before that was Monza, which I didn’t feel was a particularly great weekend from my own performance and there was obviously what happened with the pit stops,” he explained.

“But then also in Baku itself, Friday was tough, things weren’t working, I was overdriving, I wasn’t very happy with how I was driving and ultimately probably trying to make up for that a little bit on Saturday.”

The 24-year-old said several factors compounded his difficulties, including the tricky C6 tyre compounds and trying to compensate for earlier setbacks.

“I think there were some things in the lead-up, let’s say, that were maybe not the most helpful and then things that happened on the weekend,” said Piastri.

“We had an engine problem in FP1 that kind of unsettled things a bit, and then I was driving not that well.

“We were on C6 tyres [Pirelli’s new, softest compound] that weekend, which are notoriously tricky to handle. There were just a lot of little things that eventually kind of added up.”

 

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Piastri labelled the weekend “the perfect storm of quite a few things.”

“Obviously, it was a pretty terrible weekend, but I think the amount of learning we had from that weekend, from a technical point of view, emotional point of view … There’s no beating around the bush, that was the worst weekend I’ve ever had in racing, but probably the most useful in some ways.

“So, when you can start to look at things like that, normally that helps you out quite a lot.”

Despite the setback, Piastri stressed that such weekends are part of racing.

“[If] you look at some of the names that have had some pretty shocking weekends, or almost unbelievable weekends or races or moments in their career where things have gone wrong; it happens to anyone.

“There’s not one person in racing that doesn’t have some kind of disastrous story of how a weekend went wrong for them.

“Looking at it from that perspective does help a lot, but you still need to learn the things you need to learn from weekends like that.”

He added the pressure of fighting for a championship is what drives him in F1.

“When you’re in this kind of position, yes there’s pressure involved, it’s tough,” he said.

“You know, it’s uncomfortable at times, but you know, I would much rather be a bit uncomfortable at times and fighting for a world championship than you know, trying to scrape a few points every now and again and you know, this is what you go racing for, fighting for championships, especially in F1.

“This is kind of what you live for and yeah, obviously it doesn’t come easily and there’s a lot of pressure that comes with that, but you’re fighting for something worth fighting for. So it’s going to be there.”

Piastri trails Norris by 24 points with three rounds remaining of the 2025 season.