Oscar Piastri: I made a few mistakes

Oscar Piastri posted the second fastest time in qualifying for the Monaco Grand Prix, losing to pole holder Charles Leclerc by less than two-tenths of a second. For the McLaren driver, this is the best starting position of the season and only the second start in his career from the front row. Oscar believes he had a chance to take first place at the start today.

Lando Norris, Oscar’s teammate, qualified fourth.

Oscar Piastri (2nd): “If I could add my second half of the first fast lap in the final and the first half of the second fast lap, the resulting time would be enough to take first place.

I made a few mistakes at the end, but I have to give Charles credit. He has been fast all weekend, but at some points I thought we could get closer to him.

It’s great to start from the front row, but as optimistic as I want to be, overtaking on this circuit is not that easy. But I’m starting from a good position and I have a chance of a good result tomorrow.”

Lando Norris (4th): “In the end I’m happy with the fourth result, except that the first session didn’t go well and my car picked up some debris that was on the track. In general, the first part of qualifying was accompanied by severe stress, which was completely unnecessary.

But I was happy with how the second and third sessions went; I made good progress, although of course not everything worked out. But Oscar did a great job, so I take my hat off to him, his work is worth all the praise. But since we showed the 2nd and 4th results, we can say that it was a good day for the team. Maybe everything went a little better than we expected. We are ahead of Red Bull and Mercedes – I think this is a good sign.

It is unlikely that you will be able to overtake Ferrari on the track, but you should try to do something in terms of tactics or be ahead of one of them at the start, or come up with something else – it is still difficult to say. But it is unlikely that anything will be achieved simply through sheer speed.

We will try to work as efficiently as possible in the evening, and although we can hardly expect to improve significantly, we must always fight for every position until the end. But Ferrari has been ahead of us all weekend, and generally their car handles slow corners best from the very beginning of the season.

However, as I will start only one position behind the top three, fighting for a place on the podium will be our goal. Because there are a lot of fast cars starting behind us, we have to keep an eye on them too. The race promises to be interesting and tomorrow the one who makes the fewest mistakes will win.”