‘Everyone else didn’t crash’ - Oscar Piastri doesn’t buy Lance Stroll excuse

A critical Oscar Piastri has dismissed Lance Stroll’s explanation for causing a chaotic incident at a Safety Car restart in the F1 Chinese Grand Prix.

Stroll rammed into the back of Daniel Ricciardo’s RB as the field bunched up at the hairpin in preparation for the race restart in Shanghai. The contact sent Ricciardo’s car airborne and ultimately forced him into retirement.

Stroll refused to take responsibility for the crash and blamed the “concertina effect”, but Piastri feels that was no excuse.

"Everyone else didn’t crash into each other,” he said, adding: “I think in that kind of corner you always kind of need to expect that.”

Piastri was also hit by Ricciardo’s out-of-control car and picked up damage to his diffuser, though he was able to continue, holding off Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes to take eighth.

“I looked at the car afterwards, at my diffuser, I’m pretty sure that’s not how the engineers designed it,” Piastri said.

“So, yeah it’s unsurprising that I lost so much pace from that point, which is a shame because I think some good points were on offer.”

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella revealed the damage cost Piastri around four-tenths of a second.

“Oscar has damage on the diffuser. He lost a significant amount of rear downforce - equivalent I would say [to] four-tenths of a second, something like that,” he explained.

“When we heard the numbers, I wasn’t very optimistic that we could have held positions like Oscar has been able to do.

“So while his result obviously is less noticeable than Lando’s, I think he did a good job in trying to understand how to drive the car when he lost so much rear downforce.

“The car was very oversteery, obviously because you lose downforce on the rear axle, but he managed to make some adaptations and keep Hamilton behind, so that’s also a strong result.”