Steiner backs Piastri to shrug off Baku bruiser: “One bad weekend — done and dusted”
Baku has a habit of exposing the impatient. Oscar Piastri rarely falls into that bucket, but Azerbaijan caught him squarely this time — a jumped start, a slide into the wall before the lap was out, and the sort of early bath that barely fits his profile. Guenther Steiner’s verdict? Park it, move on.
“It was a shit weekend — they happen,” the former Haas boss told the Red Flags podcast, leaning into his trademark bluntness. “Oscar had one shit weekend, and that’s it. Done and dusted. He can recover pretty quick.”
Piastri’s Saturday had already been untidy. Limited running thanks to reliability gremlins, a brush with the wall in Q3, then a nose-first kiss of the barrier that left him only ninth on the grid. Come lights out, he jumped the start, sank, and overreached. The solo crash that followed wasn’t just uncharacteristic — it ended a mighty 44-race finishing streak and marked only the fourth retirement of his 63-race F1 career.
The bigger picture remains intact. Piastri still leads the championship, though the margin is slimmer now — trimmed to 25 points with seven Grands Prix and three Sprints left on the slate — and Lando Norris is looming after a profitable run. Max Verstappen, who kept collecting in Baku, has hacked his deficit down as well.
Steiner, who’s seen a few title tilts unravel under pressure, doesn’t think Piastri’s wobble signals a change in mindset. If anything, he saw the opposite.
“When you start a weekend like that, you want to make up for it,” he said. “He wanted too much, too quick. Misjudged the braking, made another mistake. What you learn is there’s no point trying to pay back a bad session by taking bigger risks.”
The Italian also pushed back on the idea that Piastri, 24, has shifted into protective mode with a points cushion to guard. “It’s too early to drive defensively,” he insisted. “He doesn’t feel secure — one engine going and you’re back to square one. I don’t think he’s managing a lead; he went on the attack and got it wrong.”
There was a sting in Steiner’s tail, too, referencing the recent McLaren team orders at Monza that flipped Piastri ahead of Norris and then back again to ensure Norris banked maximum points behind Verstappen. “Maybe he wanted to give the points back which Lando lost when the engine blew up,” he quipped, tongue clearly in cheek.
Strip the noise away and Piastri’s season-long body of work still reads like a champion’s. The Australian has built this campaign on precision and restraint, usually the anti-Baku. Azerbaijan simply magnified a scrappy Friday into a spiraling Sunday — the one place you don’t want to over-correct.
The calendar offers a useful reset. Singapore is next, a circuit that demands patience, accuracy and no small amount of faith in your car beneath the lights. Norris won there 12 months ago, Piastri was third, and Verstappen’s never cracked the Marina Bay code. It’s exactly the kind of venue where Piastri’s tidy style tends to cash in.
Steiner expects exactly that. “He was pretty cool afterwards,” he said. “You get up again and go again.” The subtext: champions aren’t defined by how they win on the good days, but how quickly they turn the bad ones into footnotes.
Baku bit back. Now we find out how fast Oscar bites back, too.
