Piastri: I played a role in us making a mistake

McLaren drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were hoping for a double at Monza after starting from the front row, but lost the race to Charles Leclerc. After the finish, Oscar made no attempt to hide his disappointment at second place, and Lando admitted he didn’t expect an attack from his partner on the first lap.

Oscar Piastri (2nd): “I won’t lie and say that this is a very painful result. I did a lot of things well today, but before the race we had a lot of questions about the strategy. Given the state of the tyres, it was very risky to stick to the one-stop strategy, but in the end it would be the right choice.

I’m really happy with the pace I was able to keep during the race, and when you come second after something like second, you feel pain.

Now we understand that it was worth trying the one-pit-stop strategy. We all become experts when we finish, but today we unfortunately made a small mistake, and I played a big part in that.

From the very beginning we were in a situation where we could lose everything. Charles was behind and could afford to try an alternative strategy. He was already planning to finish third, and today he made the right choice.

The Mediums were wearing badly and even the Red Bull Hard compound looked pretty bad from the start. My left front tyre was really gritty. We didn’t expect it to clear up but that’s exactly what happened. Hurt.”

Lando Norris (3rd): “During the race we thought about a one-stop strategy, but the granulation of the tyres made it impossible to implement it. Given the limitations of our car, we could not do the distance with one stop today. We are disappointed. Ferrari did better.

Great performance by Oscar. He overtook me and took second place. Of course it came as a surprise to me that he overtook me. I don’t know what I could have done differently. If I had braked a meter later, we probably would have collided. Ferrari had a better race today and Leclerc did better.”