Piastri puts 'unfair' McLaren decision that derailed his chance of winning under scrutiny

18:00, 01 Jul

Updated: 08:40, 03 Jul

byNorberto Mujica

In the end it was another dominant outing for McLaren at the Austrian Grand Prix. However, title contender Oscar Piastri looked back on the papaya team's strategy as something that 'needed to be reviewed'.

As the race came to its first batch of pitstops, Piastri was hunting down eventual winner and teammate Lando Norris for P1. Nevertheless McLaren opted to have the Briton box first, and leave Piastri out longer, potentially to give the Aussie a shot to come back at his teammate with fresher rubber, or to protect Norris' position perhaps?

Could the race result have changed had McLaren pitted Piastri the very folloing lap after Norris? "I don't know yet. We'll go back and look through it," said the championship leader to media including GPblog after the race.

"Like I said before, I think I was always going to lose time by pitting second. I had past experience of being just stuck outside DRS, and that was a pretty painful place to be in the past. So, I didn't really want to be there again."

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However, the alternate strategy McLaren chose to put Piastri on put the Aussie driver in an uphill battle from that moment onward.

"In the moment, I thought that [strategic decision was] giving myself a bit more work to do but with better tyres was going to be an interesting option. With hindsight, yeah, maybe you can say it wasn't the right call, but there's a lot of things you can say in hindsight," said Piastri defending his team's proceedings and decision making process throughout the race.

Prior to that, Norris had launched a chip-on-his-shoulder response to critics and took the time to also send a warning to teammate Piastri regarding his level of performance from Austria on out.