Stella: We wanted to withdraw Piastri’s car from the race

After a pit stop on the fifth lap, the brake pedal on Oscar Piastri’s McLaren failed unexpectedly due to a brake-by-wire system failure. Initially, the team wanted to take the driver out of the race, but Oscar did it – he changed the control technique and, together with the engineers, solved the malfunction. After the finish, sports director Andrea told Stella how it was

Andrea Stella: “Oskar had to drive the whole race with a problem in the braking system, which he did very well. After blocking the tires several times, he changed his flying technique.

At first we planned to take his car out of the race. The rear brakes started to overheat, so in some corners we had to brake only with the front brakes while we tried to solve the problem. The engineers found the right settings, Oscar corrected the technique, which allowed us to control the temperature of the brakes and decided to stay in the race.

We had a good weekend in Baku and in Miami we faced reality again. This shows once again that we still have a lot to do in some areas. In particular, to improve the behavior of the car when it is not accelerating or braking – now it just doesn’t work for us at such times. And on tracks like Miami it becomes too much of a limitation. This experience will help us develop the machine.”