Oscar Piastri has admitted that losing out in McLaren's controversial team orders call at the Italian Grand Prix was playing on his mind in his subsequent disastrous Azerbaijan GP weekend that really sent his 2025 Formula 1 world championship bid spiralling downwards.
McLaren asked Piastri to hand second place at Monza back to Norris after they had swapped positions due to a pitstop delay for Norris, a request Piastri acquiesced to but not without pointing out on team radio that it seemed a change to previous policy that "a slow pitstop was part of racing".
At the next round in Baku, Piastri crashed in qualifying and on the first lap of the race, having also jumped the start and been ragged in practice.
Asked on F1's own Beyond the Grid podcast if he understood the reasons why Azerbaijan had gone so badly for him, Piastri's first response referenced Monza.
"Ultimately a combination of quite a few things. Obviously the race before that was Monza, which I didn't feel was a particularly great weekend from my own performance, and there was obviously what happened with the pitstops," he replied.
"But then also Baku itself, Friday was tough. Things weren't working, I was overdriving. I wasn't very happy with how I was driving and ultimately probably trying to make up for that a little bit on Saturday.
"There were some things in the lead-up, let's say, that were maybe not the most helpful and then things that happened on the weekend - we had an engine problem in FP1 that kind of unsettled things a bit, then I was driving not that well, we were on C6 tyres that weekend that are now notoriously tricky to handle. There were just a lot of little things that kind of added up.
"I felt like on Saturday my pace was good but I was just trying a little too hard.
"That was the worst weekend I've ever had in racing, but probably the most useful in some ways."
While Piastri stopped well short of suggesting that McLaren's team orders were to blame for his mistakes, how prominent that thought was in his answer shows that it had been unsettling at a time when he was also starting to lose confidence in how he was performing.
Piastri has not won a race since the Dutch GP at the end of August, the round before Italy.
He left Zandvoort with a 44-point championship lead over Norris following his team-mate's late engine failure when running second to him, and 104 points clear of Max Verstappen.
Six rounds of pace struggles and errors later, beginning with that Monza team orders angst and also featuring the Interlagos crash and penalty last weekend, Piastri goes into the final three events 24 points behind Norris and only 25 ahead of Verstappen.
