Piastri cops pre-season blow with "complex" McLaren issue

Oscar Piastri’s first outing in Mclaren’s MCL40 ended prematurely after a fuel engine issue forced him off the track.

The 26-year-old got 48 laps under his belt at the first testing event of the year at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona, a chunk behind teammate Lando Norris 76.

The setback meant Piastri could not get out on track in the afternoon session – believed by the majority of drivers to produce faster times - and his limited track time put him fourth on the unofficial timesheets for day 4 behind both Mercedes and Charles Leclerc.

When compared to his teammate, Piastri was two-tenths slower in the new car with a lap time of 1:18.419

“It was nice to be back out today, especially in the new car,” Piastri said. “There’s a lot of challenges this year up and down the grid, so it was good to get stuck in.

“We had a fuel system issue, which cut our day short, but the team’s working hard to get that fixed and back out tomorrow.”

Asked about the issue, McLaren performance technical director Mark Temple said: “The car is very complex, so we decided to bring the car back into the garage and strip it down to fully understand where the problem is coming from, ahead of tomorrow’s running."

The Mercedes duo of George Russell and Kimi Antonelli have performed best of all drivers so far with 500 laps completed in the W17.

“We go (to Bahrain testing) with high confidence and high hopes because, definitely, it’s been good,” Antonelli said.

“Obviously, we had our issues during the shakedown, but we were able to fix them and now we can be sure that in Bahrain we can more or less hit the ground running there as well.”