Oscar Piastri shares suspicions over mysterious rib injury with surprise McLaren factor found

Oscar Piastri suspects the seat in his McLaren played a contributory role in his recent broken rib bone he raced with over several weekends.

Over the summer break, the Australian driver revealed that he’d suffered a broken rib that he raced with over several Grand Prix weekends – including his maiden F1 victory at Hungaroring.

Oscar Piastri suspects McLaren ‘pressure point’ as rib injury factor

Additional reporting by Sam Cooper.

Taking to social media, Piastri shared an X-ray image of his broken rib, with the image dated from the morning following the British Grand Prix, in which he’d finished fourth.

The Australian never showed any signs of being off-form in the weeks afterward, including taking victory at the Hungaroring before claiming second in the Belgian Grand Prix.

With the root cause of his injury remaining mysterious as Piastri didn’t address this in his original post, or a subsequent post to confirm he has fully healed for the second half of the F1 2024 season, the Australian fielded questions about it on Thursday at the Dutch Grand Prix.

“Just from driving!” he summed up when asked how he had suffered the injury.

“I mean, you could say we put so much downforce on the car… but no! Just from driving.”

The Australian suggested his injury stemmed from a ‘pressure point’ from the seat in his McLaren , something that hadn’t been noticed up until the injury made its presence known.

“I think, you make the seat, obviously, at the start of the year, and, sometimes, you get it a little bit wrong, and some tracks don’t expose it,” he said.

“But I think going from Barcelona, Austria, Silverstone, three pretty hardcore tracks, it was just a bit of a pressure point, which eventually my rib gave up, but it’s all good again now. We changed the seat and fixed it immediately, pretty much. So yeah, all back to normal.”

Piastri said he suspected the injury had occurred at some point around the Austrian Grand Prix, becoming painful to the point where he knew he needed an X-ray over the British Grand Prix weekend.

“The scan was the day after Silverstone, but it was definitely broken before Silverstone,” he said.

“Three [weekends], I would say. Definitely, it was at some point in and around Austria.

“I think it was probably a bit disturbed in Barcelona and then, Austria afterward, it was pretty painful, and Silverstone was a pretty nasty few days.

“But yeah, we made some changes, and it was already getting better, even with driving. So it’s all back to normal.”

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As for the impact of the injury on his physical training and whether he needed to make any changes to his programmes in light of the injury, Piastri said the changes made to the seat allowed him to heal up even before a few weeks away from driving the car.

“Not massively,” he said of requiring changes to his training.

“I think we identified what we could change on the seat and, even with it being broken, the pain subsided a lot once we changed a few things so it was getting better.

“Even with driving around for Budapest and Spa, it was not getting any worse. It was actually getting better, so I think we already changed what went wrong. But I’m fully back to normal.”

Piastri is facing a 10-race flurry of races in which McLaren is seeking to overcome Red Bull to claim its first Constructors’ Championship since 1998. With Piastri and Lando Norris both scoring strong points regularly, does he believe that McLaren is the favourites for the title?

“I think we’re in a strong front place, definitely,” he said.

“The gap has obviously been shrinking for the last seven or eight races so I think we’ve got a lot of momentum. Clearly, our car is performing very well, but I’m certainly not counting Red Bull out at all.

“Max [Verstappen] has been doing a great job, and I would say Sergio has gone through a similar run of form in the past, and then come out of it, and scored a lot more points.

“So we’ll see. It’s definitely not going to be an easy battle. I don’t think we’re necessarily favorites for it, but I think we have a strong chance of being able to.”

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