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Oscar Piastri has wished Daniel Ricciardo a speedy recovery from the broken hand sustained from his Dutch Grand Prix practice crash – and offered his thanks for the action he took in avoiding a potentially horrific collision.
Piastri was left stranded in his McLaren and on the racing line around the top of the banked Turn 3 at Zandvoort following his own crash in the MCL60 when Ricciardo approached the scene in his AlphaTauri.
With nowhere to go, Ricciardo was forced to steer his AT04 towards the barrier rather than broadsiding Piastri, albeit his steering wheel ricocheting into the back of his left hand and breaking a metacarpal which may yet require surgery.
Speaking for the first time since the incident with his fellow Australian, Piastri said: “Obviously, I hope he has a speedy recovery. It’s never nice to see somebody get hurt.
“I know he had the choice of hitting me or the wall, so I’m thankful he chose the wall.
“But, yeah, I just hope he recovers quickly, and we see him back on the grid.”
Piastri has confirmed, after being asked by Speedcafe, to sending Ricciardo a ‘get-well-soon’ message.
What unfolded in the second practice session was a rare mistake from Piastri in what has been an exemplary rookie campaign to date.
Piastri confirmed to being over-aggressive on his approach to what is an unusual corner in F1, with the degree of banking steeper than that at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Assessing why the corner is so tricky, Piastri said: “Just the way you have to attack the banking, it’s not the smoothest transition in the world.
“With a kind of strange behaviour on the tyres and the car, it sort of reacts a little bit differently sometimes to what you would normally expect.
“And obviously the wall is a metre to the right so if you get it wrong – as I proved – it ends badly.
“So it’s a tricky corner – definitely. You’ve kind of got to hope the grip is there when you get into the banking.
“I think I was maybe a bit ambitious, but it’s definitely a tricky one.”
Piastri went on to rediscover his confidence in taking the corner throughout final practice, and again in qualifying, although a poor final lap in Q3 undid his superb work in the first two sessions and the first half of the top-10 shoot-out, leading him to starting eighth for the race.
Assessing the best line of approach into the corner, Piastri said: “In the dry, it’s clearly around the top. In the rain, I was trying a few different things.
“In the end, the top was still the best but, especially around here, with quite a bit of rubber down, trying some different things never hurts.
“Every time you get onto a circuit that’s wet for the first time you always experiment a little bit with what lines are the best.
“In some circuits, the sort of karting line is the best, in some it’s the dry line. But that’s what practice is for, to trial these things.”
