Oscar Piastri is expecting McLaren’s controversial Papaya Rules approach to continue this year, after he found himself on the wrong side of it at last year’s Italian Grand Prix.
Piastri lost out to teammate Lando Norris in the title fight last year, a season which included a controversial moment where he let the British driver by at the Italian Grand Prix on request from the team after a botched pit-stop.
The request fell under the team’s so-called Papaya Rules, which allow the team to race freely, albeit with the team attempting to keep the fight fair between them.
In hindsight, the Monza moment looked like a turning point in the year as in the following six races Piastri went without a podium. He later admitted he was still irritated by it when he crucially crashed out of qualifying and the race at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
Having reflected on the year over the offseason, Piastri expects the same opportunity to exist this year.
“I think I got a fair shot last year and I’m expecting that to stay exactly the same,” Piastri said. “That’s definitely not to say that certain things could have been done better last year.
“I think that was probably clear for everyone watching. But I think for me at no point were there any bad intentions or any times I questioned the intentions of things. I think things could have been done better, situations could have been handled differently.
“But that is part of elite sport and part of Formula 1. You’re never going to get every decision right, you’re never going to make every single person happy. That’s part of the unique nature of Formula 1, given it’s a team sport with an individual prize at the end as well. I think I got a fair shot last year and we’re working on how we can improve things.”
McLaren boss Andrea Stella said ahead of the year the approach to racing will remain the same, albeit with a “streamlined” approach.
With regards to how precisely how the rules will be tightened up, Piastri said: “It will look different. We probably caused headaches for ourselves that we didn’t need to at points last year. But I think as a general principle and a general way of going racing it does bring a lot of positives with it, and it’s just how do we refine that to try and keep it to just positives basically.
“I think there was a lot more made out about it than actually happens, and there was a lot of hypothetical situations and a lot of people that kind of think without knowing the complete inner workings, a lot of things appear differently to how they actually are.”
Piastri had a 34-point lead after the Dutch Grand Prix, the race before the team order call in Monza, only to see his season fall apart from that point.
Up to that point the Australian had been in sensational form and for the first half of the year had largely out-performed Norris.
He suggested he’s identified where everything went wrong for him inside the car.
“A lot of the lessons, both positive and, well I don’t think it was a negative lesson, but some of them were nice lessons to learn, some of them were tougher lessons to learn. I think in terms of performance, the peaks that I had last year was firstly a nice confidence boost and kind of a statement for myself that when I get things right and maximise my potential that I can be a very strong competitor.
“I think some of the lessons in the back half of the year, especially very different in nature, I think probably a couple of things in Austin and Mexico from a technical point of view and more of a driving point of view that I hadn’t been challenged on earlier in the season. So that was probably one lesson to take forward from that. Then just obviously there was a pretty long string of races where it was pretty eventful for lots of different reasons and I think just taking the lessons out of that and how I can manage those things better, how we as a team can manage those things better, that’s probably one of the most important lessons from last year for me.
“I feel like I’ve done a lot of good work to try and learn from that, I think the team has as well, and we’ll make some tweaks, some changes to how we go about things from every aspect. Obviously the main one we’re thinking about is how we race each other and how we go racing, but even just from a performance standpoint and time management standpoint, I think there’s a lot of lessons in various areas, so just constantly evolving and not staying still is probably one of the big lessons from last year.”
