Oscar Piastri has opened up about how he moved on from the incident that cut his Australian Grand Prix short, explaining that he still learned enough to prepare him for the next round in China this weekend.
The McLaren driver, who was aiming for a stronger home race this season after he drove wide onto the grass in 2025 and sacrificed a podium, lost control of his car on a reconnaissance lap and slid into the wall.
With the damage deemed too significant to continue, Piastri was forced to watch the race from the sidelines while his team mate Lando Norris secured a valuable P5 – but the experience taught him how he and the team can bounce back in China.
“It was relatively quick to put that behind me – obviously it’s one I try to forget,” he said of the crash. “I think having a race this weekend is always nice and there’s still plenty to focus on.
“There was still plenty to try and learn from all the running we did in Melbourne and even just for me, trying to understand what racing looks like now was interesting to watch at least. I’m not expecting [this weekend] to be dramatically different to Melbourne.
“I think we’ve identified quite a lot of areas where we can improve and where we could have done better, but I think most people will have those opportunities. I think it will be a similar picture but hopefully we can get a bit closer.”
After winning both the Drivers’ and Teams’ Championships last year, the early results seem to suggest that the Woking outfit has fallen behind Mercedes and Ferrari under the new regulations, with Piastri finding himself eight-tenths adrift of George Russell’s pole position time at Albert Park.
Norris similarly ended up unable to seriously challenge the frontrunners in the race, but despite the deficit, Piastri appeared optimistic that their extensive debrief from the weekend will help them take a step forward.
“I think there will be plenty of opportunities and there are still plenty of things to learn,” he added. “Even the first five or 10 laps of the race in Melbourne were pretty chaotic so I think that element is probably not going to change too much anywhere, which obviously brings a level of risk to everyone.
“I think we learned, after Qualifying especially and in the days since, that we didn’t necessarily optimise what we had in Melbourne. Throughout practice, the picture looked a lot more optimistic – I think overly optimistic at points, but it was a surprise for us to lose so much competitiveness from Friday to Saturday. I think we’ve got a pretty good understanding of why now, so I think we can get closer. We still think we’re going to have a deficit to Mercedes, but I think we identified a lot of things we can do better.”
