Oscar Piastri is 23 years old, but he looks much older every time he gets into his car. If Kimi Raikkonen earned the nickname Iceman, the Australian seems to be frozen, very appropriate if we take into account that he was born in Melbourne, a fantastic city for all those who flee the heat. In his second season in the Formula 1 World Championship, the kid is proving to be capable of offering his best version in any register, attacking or defending, always brilliant as Mark Webber’s pupil, who has managed to mold a driver with all the virtues that he had, but without the emotional point that harmed him so much in his time. In Baku, one of the most monumental circuits on the calendar, a stage that mixes dizzying sections with other very slow ones, which twist like a snail, like the passageway of the castle, Piastri nailed a Sunday for history, riding a car that was not the fastest of the day, a circumstance that gives even more value to what he achieved.
The McLaren driver caught Charles Leclerc off guard and stole the Ferrari driver’s wallet, who tried to return it to him and went from fighting for the win to being on the verge of missing out on the podium. If the Monegasque driver finished second it was due to the misfortune of Carlos Sainz and Checo Pérez, who got tangled up right behind him on the penultimate lap, crashed into the wall and forced the race to end with a neutralisation. George Russell took advantage of this to finish third, while Fernando Alonso finished sixth.
The day was a day of praise for Piastri and McLaren. The driver, for everything he did on the track, and his team, for the work they did off it, within the confines of the Technology Center, the secret laboratory of the papaya cars. Despite not driving the fastest prototype, the boy threw himself like a lion at Leclerc’s neck on the only opportunity he had (lap 20), just after he had stopped by the garage to change the tyres, and launched the car at him practically from Australia. The Ferrari driver blinked and when he opened his eyes he saw himself second, surely wondering how many laps he would have to take to regain control of the pack. He had time; he didn’t have weapons. Despite the pressure he put on his rival, Leclerc was unable to overtake him again, sealing an almost perfect Sunday for the British team: Piastri’s second win, combined with Lando Norris’ fourth place – who started 15th – and Red Bull’s debacle, allowed the Woking team to overtake the Red Buffalo at the top of the constructors’ points table, something they had not achieved since 2014.
With its pair of young talents, McLaren has two gems and a problem on the horizon. After the brawl between the two at Monza – Piastri threw the car at Norris on the first lap and opened the door for Ferrari to win – the executive of the British structure sat the two drivers down and asked them to be sensible, to try to think of the common good without forgetting the individual. Norris’s mistake in the qualifying session eliminated him from the equation and freed up his neighbour in the workshop, who pulled out of the hat one of the races of his life.
“After the stop I saw that I was closer to Charles, and that I had more grip. I felt that I had to go for it,” said Piastri. “If I didn’t pass him at the start of the session, I wouldn’t be able to do it in my life,” added the young man from Victoria, who in just one year has witnessed a practically miraculous revitalisation of his prototype. “When I joined the team last year we were literally last, and now we lead the World Championship,” reflected the star of the day in Azerbaijan. “It was a perfect execution by Oscar. It wasn’t a surprise for us, because we have worked with him for about 40 Grand Prix and we know the talent and mental strength that he has. There is nothing that bothers him,” said Andrea Stella, the McLaren director.
With this result, the winner in Baku will go to Singapore next week 91 points behind Max Verstappen, who finished fifth and remains in the lead – with a 59-point advantage over Norris – although he looks more vulnerable than ever. This is exactly the opposite of the image projected by the winner, who is in an unbeatable dynamic: with 135 points, he is the member of the grid who has scored the most points in the last seven races.
Sainz and Perez crash into the wall
It is not clear whether Checo Pérez’s great race in Baku was more remarkable, or Carlos Sainz’s, or the fact that both of them came out unscathed from the brutal accident they had on the penultimate lap of the race and when they and Charles Leclerc were playing for second and third place on the podium. Despite his pushes on Oscar Piastri, the Monegasque driver ended up giving up and being swallowed up by the Mexican and the Spaniard, who came from behind and with fresher tyres. The Red Bull driver’s attack opened a door through which the Madrid driver slipped in, who beat him to it and placed himself in the slipstream of his Ferrari teammate. When approaching the exit of the second curve of the track, Sainz went very subtly to the left, on the same line as each turn, and there he found his rival’s car, with whom he twisted himself into a tangle of carbon fibre that went straight to crash into the concrete wall that surrounds the Azerbaijan circuit. A disastrous end to the party that could have been tragic, leaving the two people involved more affected than angry, but without any hard feelings between them.
“I am happy and calm to see that both Checo and I are fine, after such a strong impact against the wall. And then, of course, I am very upset because I was having a very good race on a circuit that normally costs me,” summed up Sainz, who started third and was caught up in the pit stop, and who went from less to better, finishing the last 20 laps as the fastest car of all. “I followed the normal line on this circuit, and for some reason that I don’t understand, we touched. I didn’t even try to defend myself from him,” added the Ferrari driver, who like the lad from Jalisco went to the stewards’ offices to give his version of the events.
The physical blow was hard; the moral, even harder. For Sainz, who in the last few races has lost the momentum he had at the beginning of the year, and even more so for Perez, questioned as always at Red Bull, and who for the first time after 16 Grand Prix had managed to beat Max Verstappen in timed practice. Red Bull arrived in Baku with the threat of McLaren, who left there as the new reference in the manufacturers’ statistics. Partly, because of the Jalisco driver’s failure. “I came out of the corner with quite a gap between the two cars. As Leclerc went towards my line, and as Carlos tried to follow his slipstream, we touched. Neither of us had time to react. It was all very fast,” explained the Guadalajara native. “It was a disastrous weekend, in which I should have finished second or third, and which ended up being very bad because of the number of points we lost,” Perez concluded.
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