Piastri reveals ignored team order is 'what won me the race'

Oscar Piastri ignored a call for patience from race engineer Tom Stallard before making his race-winning lunge to overtake Charles Leclerc for the lead of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. Piastri battled Leclerc hard in the opening laps of the race, believing clear air to be key to victory, but overused his medium tires in the process, dropping him to 5.9s adrift by the time he made his pit stop on lap 15. Only Leclerc’s slow laps into and out of pit lane brought Piastri back into contention immediately after the Monegasque made his stop one lap later. The Australian was implored to take a different tack with his second chance. McLaren analyzed his used medium tires and found he’d overused them, and he’d have to be much gentler with his new set of hards to get them the 36 laps to the checkered flag. Piastri gave that idea short shrift, leaning heavily on his tires for a late-braking overtake on lap 20 to take a lead he’d never relinquish. “I felt a bit sorry for my race engineer because I basically tried to do that in the first stint and completely cooked my tires,” Piastri said. “My engineer came on the radio and said, ‘Let’s not do that again,’ basically, and I completely ignored him the next lap and sent it down the inside. “It’s what won me the race.” Piastri said he didn’t see the logic in playing a patient game in behind a car that was at least a match for the McLaren. “I think at that point I felt like trying to stay back and wait for Charles to deg was never going to happen,” he explained. “I thought he was just going to secure us P2. “A similar opportunity in the first stint. I felt like on lap two or three I was just within DRS but didn’t fully capitalize on that opportunity. “I got to the end of the straight thinking, ‘If I had have done a couple of things a bit differently here, I maybe had a chance.’ So when I had a similar opportunity after the pit stop, I had to take it. “ was a high-risk, high-commitment … but that’s what I needed to do to try and win the race, because I wasn’t really going to be that keen to finish second.” He was unable to pull away from Leclerc once in first place, with the Ferrari doggedly pursuing the lead. “I knew that getting into the lead was going to be, let’s say, 40 percent of the job, but that hanging on to it was going to be 60 percent, and I knew that I’d use the tires pretty heavily to try and get in front and I knew what kind of impact that had in the first stint,” he said. “Just trying to keep Charles behind was incredibly stressful. I couldn’t make a single mistake. I made a couple, but at a track like Baku it’s impossible to be driving flat out and not make any. I was just fortunate that they weren’t big enough that it cost me. “The whole 30 laps where I was trying to keep Charles behind was incredibly tough. “I think for me that has to be one of the best races I’ve done.” Victory is the latest big result in a strong run of form for Piastri who is the sport’s highest scoring driver over the last 11 rounds. His 25 points also helped propel McLaren to the lead of the constructors championship for the first time more than a decade. “It’s not just down to me,” he said. “We’ve had a car that’s been very quick and consistently quick in a lot of places, and even if we’ve not necessarily been the outright quickest everywhere, we’ve been in with a chance everywhere. “Today was definitely one of those days where we weren’t necessarily the quickest, but we had a car that could put us in the fight. We had a pit stop that could put us in the fight. We had some teamwork that put us in the fight, and it all managed to pay off. “I feel like I’ve been driving well. It’s been clicking a bit more for me this year in terms of the things I want to work on from last season. Combine that with a car that’s capable of winning, and results like this are possible.”