Ignored McLaren engineer responds to Oscar Piastri’s snub on way to Baku victory

Tom Stallard admits it is a good thing the “racer” in Oscar Piastri ignored his instructions in Baku as he’s not sure he could’ve attacked Charles Leclerc late in the race.

Lining up second to Charles Leclerc on the Azerbaijan Grand Prix grid, it looked towards the end of the first stint that the race result may have already been decided in the Ferrari driver’s favour as he built up a six-second lead over the McLaren driver.

Oscar Piastri ignored Tom Stallard’s tyre warning

Although Piastri was all over the back of the Ferrari’s rear wing in the opening laps, he damaged his tyres and, as the stint continued, began to fall away.

McLaren brought Piastri in to swap his mediums for a set of hard Pirellis on lap 16 when he trailed Leclerc by six seconds, with the Monegasque driver in a lap later to cover. The gap was less than two seconds when Leclerc re-emerged ahead of Piastri on the track.

Piastri made short work of Alex Albon, who was between them, and the deficit to pass Leclerc for the lead down the inside of Turn 1 on lap 20.

Winning the Grand Prix ahead of the Ferrari driver, the Aussie admitted he felt “sorry” for his race engineer Stallard as he’d asked the driver to take it easy on his hard tyres but Piastri had “completely ignored” him .

Stallard, in hindsight, is glad he did.

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“We attacked Charles in the first stint, and we didn’t get past and in doing so we damaged the tyres quite a lot and then we weren’t able to keep up with him anymore and Charles was able to build a big gap,” he explained on the F1 Nation podcast .

“Then we had had a good pit stop, Lando did a wonderful job helping out with Checo, and suddenly we’re back on the gearbox of Leclerc.

“And I wanted to remind him what happened in the first stint, because there were still a lot of laps at that point, so I sort of said, ‘remember in the first stint we damaged the tyres lot attacking, and this time let’s be tactical’.

“But he knows me well to know that’s the scientist in me is saying that but the racer that’s not saying anything is saying go and get him. And the racer in Oscar fortunately went and got him.

“We saw that the Ferrari and the Red Bull couldn’t get past Oscar and I’m not sure that those fortunes wouldn’t have been reversed had the cars been in different order.”

Taking the lead with 30 to go, Piastri put on a masterclass in defending as he had Leclerc all over his rear wing with the Ferrari driver trying six, if not seven, times to take the lead.

The McLaren driver stood firm in his defence, holding the inside line as he made Leclerc try to pass around the outside and use up his tyres. Leclerc’s rubber fell off the cliff with three to go allowing Piastri breathing room as he checked out at the front.

“It was certainly stressful,” admitted Stallard, “because when it’s that time, you know that the driver is never really relaxed so you lose a lot of the opportunity to chat to him.

“So all of the kind of background decision making we’re doing that normally we would bring the driver in, we try not to burden him with too much information because he had quite a lot on.

“So largely leaving him to it, just giving him the gaps, making sure we’re managing the battery, the odd update on how his tyres are doing, how Charles’ tyres are doing, trying to provide helpful information at times that is not too distracting.

“So it’s tricky because for a lot of that you’re thinking really hard, but you’re also kind of an observer.”

Claiming his second win of the championship, Piastri is 91 points behind Max Verstappen in the fight for the World title and 32 behind Lando Norris.

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