Oscar Piastri wins big despite missing Canadian GP podium
Oscar Piastri is basking in his most profitable result of the season, as Lando Norris literally and metaphorically hits the wall.
May the fourth be with Oscar Piastri. He’s missed the podium at the Canadian Grand Prix while basking in his most profitable result of the season. Lando Norris is literally and metaphorically hitting the wall as Piastri fangs his McLaren further ahead in the drivers’ championship. He’s become an unstoppable fourth.
Apologies for the lisp. He’s become an unstoppable force, winning the mental battle with his increasingly desperate and panicky McLaren teammate. Amateur psychologists everywhere – you and I! – suspected a collision at Montreal’s Circuit Gilles Villeneuve the moment Norris predicted an incident at some stage of the year. As if Norris had spoken into being the mano-a-mano, McLaren-on-McLaren bingle, and as if Norris had manifested the rear-ender that dented only his own world title prospects, it all came to pass when he tried to pass Piastri on lap 66 of their 70-lap expedition.
Norris’s race engineer, Will Joseph, was egging him on. “Attack Oscar”, was the instruction. Norris complied. He snuck past Piastri on a hairpin like he was scooting from dummy-half in State of Origin II. Then the McLarens were neck-and-neck, side-by-side, wheel-to-wheel, eyeball-to-eyeball in hair-rising, spine-tingling scenes at 312km/h, bolting like Alligator Blood and Mr Brightside at Flemington, arguing like Kath and Kim, before Piastri surged back ahead. Norris tried again to attack Oscar.
He lunged forward at the wrong time and place. He went for a gap that didn’t exist. Now the State of Origin dummy-half was skirting the sideline, knowing he’d be bundled into touch before it happened, lamenting the foolishness of his attempt. It was like trying to thread an F1 car through the eye of a needle, like pushing a two-metre sofa through a one-metre doorway. Norris hit Piastri’s rear left wheel, and pinballed into the wall, and lost a chunk of front wing, skidding to a halt while his front left tyre hung like a loose tooth.
May his race be over. The incident could have ruined Piastri’s rally, too, because these sensitive, lightweight F1 cars can collapse at the slightest touch, but he waltzed home in fourth while gobbling up 12 championship points to Norris’s large, fat zero.
“Obviously it’s not ideal for anyone,” Piastri said, too polite to admit the stack was totally and completely ideal for him.
Mercedes’ George Russell took the chequered flag. Immaterial. Red Bull’s Max Verstappen was second. Yawn. The Silver Arrows’ Kimi Antonelli was third. What of it? The championship is Piastri versus Norris and there was only one winner there as the poised, tranquil and imperturbable Melburnian drove into the Montreal sunset with a 22-point rankings’ lead and perhaps a song in his heart.
Well, Will Joseph, the attack on Oscar backfired. The engineer asked Norris, “Are you all right, dude?” To Norris’s credit, he owned his mistake. “Yep,” he replied. “I’m sorry. It’s all my bad. All my fault. Unlucky. Sorry. Stupid from me.”
The first bloke to shake Piastri’s hand after the back-and-forth for fourth was Norris. “I haven’t actually seen the incident so I don’t know what exactly happened but if Lando has taken full responsibility, then that’s how it goes, I guess,” Piastri said. “It was just a bit of a tricky race in general and not an ideal one for me.”
Piastri and/or Norris had graced every podium this year. A presentation ceremony without a McLaren driver was like Gotham City without Batman and Robin. Russell, Verstappen, Antonelli, who are these people?
“Lando made quite a large move into turn 10 and I held my own into the chicane,” Piastri said. “It was definitely a tough battle but a clean one until that point. Again, I’ve not seen the incident, but I don’t think there was any bad intentions involved. I think it was just unfortunate, really. We’re both fighting for a world championship and I’m very thankful to the team that they allow us to race. I don’t expect this to change anything in terms of that.”
All Norris’s bad. All his fault. Unlucky. Sorry. Stupid from him. “No one to blame but myself,” he said. “I apologise to the whole team and to Oscar, as well, for attempting something a bit too silly. Glad I didn’t ruin his race and yeah, apologies to the team. Our number one rule is to not make contact with my teammate, and that’s what I did.”
Properly remorseful, Norris added: “McLaren is my family. I race for them. Every single weekend, I try and do well for them, more than I often try and do well for myself. When I let them down like this, and when I make a fool of myself in a moment like today, I have a lot of regret. I’m not proud of that and I feel bad and I feel like I let down my team. That’s always the worst feeling. Apologies to everyone and I’ll crack on.”
McLaren principal Andrea Stella definitely held no doubts about how serious the incident most definitely was. “We definitely never want to see the two McLarens touching each other,” he said. “It’s something we definitely need to review because this is a very clear principle. At the same time, it’s a contact that happened because of a misjudgment. Lando misjudged the distance to the car ahead and therefore there was definitely no malintent. Lando owned it immediately and took responsibility for that. It cost Lando quite a lot in the championship and was about to cost many more points for the team, so this was definitely an incident that should not have happened.”
Without Batman and Robin featuring in the top three, it was McLaren’s worst weekend of the season. Worryingly, the papayas were off the pace from their first shift and never recovered. Piastri and Norris qualified third and seventh before finishing fourth and not at all.
The brilliant Sky Sports analyst Nico Rosberg said, “Lando did an amazing first lunge but it’s just very strange, the mistake he made. It’s just one more mistake by him of many, and it’s a big mistake. It becomes a little bit traumatic at some point because you keep spiralling, ‘I’m making mistakes, I’m not good enough.’ It gets to you. It can get pretty dark.”
Verstappen protested the Canadian GP result due to alleged erratic driving by Russell under the safety car and the fact he cannot stand the bloke. Complaints fell on deaf ears and the standings, well, they stood. The next race is the Austrian Grand Prix on June 29.
“For me, this weekend wasn’t good enough,” Piastri said. “It’s still far, far too early to think that it (the drivers’ championship lead) is a comfortable advantage or anything like that. There’s a long way to go in the season and we’ve got to try and improve on the whole. Obviously a shame for the team today … just not the easiest of weekends. You’ve got to take the results you get sometimes and I think this is one of those weekends. We’ll keep going racing.”
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