Piastri sinks deeper into trouble: I had no grip on fresh tyres

Oscar Piastri’s season really is going from bad to worse. The Australian narrowly missed out on the title last year and has been nowhere near championship-winning form this season. His performance and result in qualifying in Mexico only underlined that.

It must be said that Mexico has never been a particularly happy hunting ground for Piastri. Last year, he was seven tenths of a second slower than his team-mate in qualifying and finished the race 42 seconds behind a dominant Norris. Two years ago, he was knocked out in Q2 at this circuit.

Two years on, the Australian was eliminated in Q2 here again, shocked both him and the entire team. “I don’t know what happened. I had no rear grip,” Oscar said over the radio.

Piastri’s team-mate, meanwhile, set the fastest time in Q2 and was 0.918 seconds quicker. Oscar was also beaten by midfield drivers such as Hülkenberg and Colapinto. “I felt like in Q1, we had plenty of pace and, yeah, I felt like it was possible,” said Piastri after qualifying. His team had sent him out on a used set of tyres at the start of Q2 and only switched to fresh rubber for the second runs.

“Just the new tyres, I mean, I barely improved. So, that was the biggest issue. But in normal circumstances it should have been plenty comfortable enough. And, I don’t know, what changed on that new set of tyres, but no grip at all,” Piastri explained.

The Australian is not expecting much from Sunday’s race. Although the cars do not slow down at the end of the long straights in Mexico, they also stop accelerating halfway along them. Given the thin air at high altitude and the difficulty of overtaking, it is far from certain whether drivers will be able to get close enough to one another on Sunday.

“Hopefully, we can go forward,” said the Australian. “But it’s going to be tricky. It’s tough to overtake around here, especially in this generation of cars. Everyone’s kind of stuck in this speed limiter on the straight because of the MGU-K rules. So, it’s going to be a bit bizarre, but we’ll wait and see,” Piastri added.