Piastri ‘over-compensated’ for conservative car set-up

Piastri qualified fifth for Saturday night’s race in Jeddah, one place higher than team-mate Lando Norris, despite brushing the wall at the final corner.

According to team boss Andrea Stella, that moment was a result of limitations with the set-up.

“I decided to see if the wall at the last corner have moved anywhere. It definitely hadn’t,” Piastri joked.

“I think I just tried to push the limits of it too much. Hit a couple of walls this weekend, which has not been ideal.

“But from that side of things it was pretty normal and straightforward,” he added of his qualifying session.

“Maybe we could have done – well, just could have driven a little bit better and not hit a wall – but I think also the way we set up the car earlier in the weekend, maybe we didn’t expose some of the limitations that I had in qualifying.

“So I had to get used to that a little bit, which didn’t help.”

The limitation, it seems was driver-induced as Piastri pushed the car beyond what it was capable of, before dialling that back as qualifying wore on.

“Purely on the setup side of things, we maybe weren’t aggressive enough in practice with certain things and, in qualifying, maybe we overdid it a little bit and over-compensated and had to wind it back a bit,” he explained.

“That’s mainly the limitation. I think the car still has the same limitations as when we go elsewhere, but maybe just the track grip here and the circuit layout helps us out a little bit.”

Despite those limitations, team boss Andrea Stella felt Piastri maximised the car that was at his disposal.

“Possibly the car was a little too space in practice sessions,” he explained.

“The engineers tried to provide him with good balancewhich meant that the car was a little more neutral in qualifying.

“And this means, especially when you push so much in qualifying, means that a couple of times he was surprised with the car being a little snappy – like when he lost the car out of the last corner and he touched the wall, for instance.

“So this requires a little bit of adaptation to the qualifying session and Oscar, I have to say, adapted while being competitive pretty much in every run up to the final qualifying, which I think we can say that he maximised the performance available.”