Oscar Piastri isn’t interested in relitigating Monza. Two weeks on from the team-orders fuss that handed Lando Norris second place, the McLaren driver arrived in Baku sounding measured, a little wiser, and very much on-message.
The flashpoint was simple enough: Norris suffered a slow late stop at Monza and rejoined behind Piastri, who’d been pitted first. McLaren then asked Piastri to move aside. On the radio, the Australian noted that “slow pit stops” are part of the game. Post-race, social media and talk shows did the rest.
Since then, Piastri says the debriefs have happened and the grey areas have been filled in. Crucially, he learned of an extra factor he wasn’t aware of in the cockpit — the pit sequence that set up the scenario in the first place. Once that piece clicked into place, the decision made more sense.
“We’ve gone through it properly,” he told reporters ahead of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. “We’ve clarified a lot of things and we’re aligned on how we race. What’s done is done.”
That’s the line, and he stuck to it. He still believes a botched stop shouldn’t automatically dictate finishing order, but accepts Monza wasn’t quite that binary. You can sense the internal compromise: defend the racer’s code without lighting a match under the team’s title push.
Inevitably, Mark Webber’s name hovered over the conversation. Piastri’s manager — and a man who lived the sharp end of intra-team politics alongside Sebastian Vettel — was spotted heading into McLaren hospitality after the race, prompting a round of “what would Mark do?” discourse. According to Piastri, the answer was: not much talking, at least publicly. Webber, he said, is on the same page — focus on performance, keep the emotion low, and make sure the next weekend is better than the last.
There was a touch of steel in Piastri’s self-assessment, too. He reckons he earned third at Monza, not second, and that’s the part he’s taking personally. That’s a racer’s tell: channel the sting, fix the pace, and the rest tends to sort itself out.
What about next time? Could we see the same order come through and the same response? Unlikely, Piastri said, because you rarely get a carbon copy in Formula 1. The variables change, the context shifts. He made it clear he trusts McLaren to call it straight and that he’ll keep driving for the maximum unless and until he’s told otherwise.
And the outside noise? He’s not surprised there was a pile-on. Controversy travels faster than common sense. But he pushed back on the idea that McLaren’s drivers are puppets in a papaya play: “We have enough freedom to control our own destiny in the championship,” he said, drawing a line under one of the simmering narratives of the season.
That championship context matters. With Baku looming, McLaren has the form and the firepower to tilt the constructors’ race decisively and keep both drivers’ hopes alive deep into the autumn. The internal balance between Norris and Piastri has mostly been handled cleanly this year — hard but fair, elbows out without trading paint — and everyone at Woking knows the margin for error shrinks when titles are on the table.
So, Azerbaijan becomes a temperature check. The Baku City Circuit is notorious for amplifying small misreads into big headlines. It rewards teams who decide quickly and drivers who don’t blink. In other words, exactly the kind of weekend where trust between pit wall and cockpit needs to be airtight.
Strip away the noise and Piastri’s stance is pretty straightforward. He wanted more pace at Monza, he didn’t have it, and he doesn’t want a repeat. He’s listened, accepted the missing context, and moved on. If there’s an echo of Webber’s pragmatism in that, it’s probably not an accident.
One more quiet takeaway: for all the chatter, McLaren’s driver pairing remains one of the paddock’s great competitive assets — two young drivers pushing each other, capable of winning on different types of circuits, and still buying into the bigger picture. That’s not automatic in this sport, and it’s a big reason why McLaren keeps knocking on the door, even when the weekends get messy.
Now Baku asks a familiar question: who blinks first?
McLaren will hope the answer is neither of them.
