Oscar Piastri is relishing the prospect of tackling “old-school” Zandvoort despite being wary of knowing that making an error will lead to him paying a severe price.
In terms of his education in his rookie year, the Dutch Grand Prix circuit is a relatively new venue for the 22-year-old Australian despite his experience of numerous tracks during the formative years of his career.
Other than “maybe 15 or 20 (laps) in a Formula Renault in a practice session a few years ago”, Zandvoort will be a challenge for Piastri as he aims to build on a solid end to the first half of the season following the introduction of upgrades on his McLaren.
Assessing how quickly he will adapt to what is a short, narrow circuit with minimal straights and two banked corners, Piastri said: “The speed at which all these corners will come at me is going to be new.
“It’s an old-school track so it’ll probably take all of Friday to be close to fully up to speed. I’ll sleep on it, process it, and then, hopefully, by Saturday it’s okay.
“But definitely around here if you get it wrong, you pay a big, big price, which in some ways is nice.
“Fingers crossed, there’s not a talk about track limits and stuff like that, it should be pretty obvious if you’ve exceeded track limits because you’ll probably be in a gravel trap somewhere.
“But it looks like a really cool track, and especially in an F1 car, I’m sure it will be a lot of fun.”
The updates to the MCL60 allowed Piastri to finish fourth in the British Grand Prix and fifth in the following race in Hungary.
He then qualified and finished second in the sprint race ahead of a Belgian GP in which he retired on the opening lap after a first-corner clash with Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz.
The car has proven adept over medium- and high-speed corners in its new configuration but retains a weakness through slow-speed sections.
Given the unusual nature of Zandvoort, Piastri is unsure as to how it will fare over the next few days.
“I think there are elements of this track that suit us, like the high-speed corners, the lack of straights, and there are some things that don’t suit us, like the slower corners,” assessed Piastri.
“Just looking at the track, it’s starting to get a bit older now, a few bumps here and there, which also does…I wouldn’t say really helps us, but it doesn’t really help anybody when a track is bumpy.
“We’ve been able to show in the last few races, with three different layouts – okay, Spa we had some clear weaknesses but our actual car pace overall still wasn’t that bad, especially in mixed conditions it was still strong.
“I think we can be reasonably confident that we can still fight at the front, it’s just going to be whether the stronger parts of the track are better than the weaker parts relative to others.”
Discussion about this post