Piastri's boss wants F1 rule review after Aus GP crash

Oscar Piastri has the mental resilience to bounce back from his disappointing Australian Grand Prix as the Formula One circus moves to China, according to his McLaren boss.

The Melburnian failed to make the start line of the opening Grand Prix of the 2026 season after crashing his car on the formation lap, causing too much damage to recover for the race.

Pisatri had qualified fifth but was forced to watch from pitlane as George Russell claimed the opening victory of the year.

It was later explained that a combination of driver error, cold tyres and an additional 100kw in power contributed to the incident on turn 4 which prompted McLaren team principal Andrea Stella to call for an investigation into the new regulations.

“Very unfortunate, definitely a tough moment for him in front of the Australian crowd,” Stella said.

“But Oscar, a very tough guy mentally, he will use all this to get even more concentrated and determined, starting from China.

“We will make sure we face this in a united way. We are a team in any situation that may involve anybody in our team.

“I think it requires a little bit of attention in terms of associating it with the regulations, necessarily.

“Certainly, these power units can be quite aggressive when they release all the power. We talk about 1000 horsepower coming all together, and when the tyres may be a little bit on the cold side, or if this power comes in an unpredictable way, as it happened to Oscar, then it can become very tricky.

“So I don’t want to be here saying I have an easy solution. But I’m here saying we should look into the regulations. These accidents were not a near miss.

“They are very material indication that there’s work to do. So we should do this work as the F1 community.”

Explaining further what contributed to the incident, Stella said: “When it comes to the circumstances, what we observed, I think, is fundamentally three factors: the cold tyres that fall when the wheel spin starts. It starts in a very sudden way.

“This compounds with him being on a kerb. It’s a kerb that he has used pretty much every single lap.

“Kerbs don’t make this easier, though, when the tyres are cold and this farther compounds with an element that doesn’t make it easier again, which is the fact that, with these oscillations and following the shift, there’s extra torque, let’s say, that when we look at the behaviour of the power unit, is sort of expected to happen like that, but it is not something that you would do unless it’s sort of requirements that you need to meet in terms of how you deploy your torque.

“In testing, we might have seen some similar circumstances, but we didn’t have the combination of cold tyres and the kerb, which aggravated the fact that you may have these inconsistencies from a power deployment point of view.

“Well, power deployment is not correct. I would say torque deployment in grip-limited phases.”

Seventeen cars of a possible 22 finished the race on Sunday with Nico Hulkenberg also failing to start, while Isack Hadjar, Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll all retired.

Piastri, who has a cult following in Australia, was bitterly disappointed by the events in Melbourne.

“Last year the result wasn’t what I wanted but there was a lot of positives from the weekend,” he said.

“This year the disappointment is even greater but I think up until today, we did a lot of things well.

“We clearly identified some things we need to change and do a better job at.

“But through practice and qualifying felt, I pretty comfortable, as well as you can with these cars, and felt I was building myself in nicely.

“That element is not dissimilar to last year, so I’ll just try and take the learnings.”