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Piastri and Lawson came together on Lap 26 while battling for seventh place.
The McLaren driver went for a move under brakes into Turn 1 where he made contact with the RB’s right-rear wheel.
That sent Lawson spinning into the run-off, costing him two positions in the process.
Officials looked at the clash and deemed Piastri responsible, handing him a 10-second penalty.
Applied at the end of the 69-lap race, it relegated the Aussie from seventh to eighth.
“I was stuck behind him for a long time,” Piastri explained.
“I didn’t really get far enough alongside, and I spoke to him about it and he said he didn’t see me either, which in those conditions is fair enough.
“It was clearly my mistake and the penalty was deserved.”
The scrap with Lawson defined the opening half of Piastri’s race.
Caught behind the RB during the early stages he was unable to make progress.
He then struggled for pace in the latter half of the race and was unable to move forward.
“It was just a tough day from start to end,” Piastri admitted.
“Qualifying, partly a mistake, partly a bit of a problem, and when you put the two together it creates a big problem.
“Then we were struggling with that a bit in the race, but I think we were just slow.
“The first half of the race we seemed very quick. Lando [Norris] was stuck behind George [Russell], I was stuck behind Liam.
“I got Liam out of the way, not really the way I’d intended, but I think the second half of the race, after the red flag, we were just slow.
“Both of us just struggled with pace.”
With heavy rain for both qualifying and the race, McLaren reverted to its Mexico-spec rear wing – a higher downforce configuration that the circuit-specific design it had intended to use.
That gave Piastri and Norris more downforce, but at the cost of top speed.
“Top speed didn’t seem great, but I don’t think that was our biggest problem,” Piastri reasoned.
“We were obviously gaining in the corners with the downforce we had, but clearly not enough.
“I’m not sure how limiting it was,” he added of the wing choice.
“You could argue with qualifying it helped. With the extra downforce in the race it should have helped in the majority of the lap.
“In the first half of the race, yes, maybe you could argue it was holding us back a bit because we were stuck behind cars.
“But the second half, we weren’t stuck behind cars, we were just slow.
“So I think it doesn’t really matter which rear wing we had on in the second half, we weren’t really going to finish any better.”
Piastri picked up four points for eighth place, while Norris claimed eight for his sixth-place finish, while Lawson recovered to ninth.
Added to the McLaren duo’s one-two in Saturday’s Sprint, it equated to a 27-point haul in Brazil – the second-highest-scoring team over the weekend.
That has translated into a 40-point margin in the constructors’ championship over Ferrari, with Red Bull Racing nine points further back in third.
Three events remain in 2024, a triple-header that takes in Las Vegas, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi, the middle leg being a Sprint event.
