Oscar Piastri, starting from P2 on the grid, had only one thing in mind when the lights went off in Jeddah—win the Grand Prix and lead the championship standings.
The Melbourne-born driver did a good job at that, getting the better of Max Verstappen at turn one and also forcing a five-second time penalty on the Dutchman. From there on, he kept his head to drive a flawless race to victory, taking a 10-point lead at the top.
Piastri was also leaps and bounds better than his teammate Lando Norris throughout the course of the weekend. The Briton had crashed in qualifying, which made him start from 10th, and in the race, the best he could recover to was P4. Not enough to earn plaudits, considering he was the championship favorite heading into the season. So, compared to Norris, Piastri was flawless.
But those comparisons didn’t matter to driver coach Martin Villari. A win, of course, under any circumstances is good. But he feels there was one area where Piastri was not quite as good as Norris—or even Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, who finished third.
Villari believes that unlike Norris and Leclerc, Piastri didn’t use the kerb at Turn 2 to his advantage—something that would have helped him manage his tires much better.
Showcasing a snap of Leclerc on his Instagram, Villari explained how the Monegasque perfectly placed both his right front and rear tires over the entire kerb to improve the balance of his car.
“I would be happy with this if I was coaching Charles. This is great, this is the way it is done,” he explained. “Here is another shot of Charles. You can see just how stable the car is“.
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Villari then moved to Norris. “Lando, this is perfect car positioning as well,” he said.
He feels that since both Piastri and Mercedes’ George Russell didn’t quite get their cars over the full kerb like Norris and Leclerc, they most likely struggled with graining on their front-left tires.
Villari further pointed out that Russell even complained about this during the race. The King’s Lynn-born driver—who started the race in P3—didn’t execute this part of the lap as well as he could have. As a result, Villari believes he ended up using much more of his tires and became vulnerable to both Leclerc and Norris, who passed him for third and fourth, respectively. Russell eventually finished P5.
As for Piastri, he could afford to take a more conservative approach, as he never looked under threat from those behind—even though Verstappen managed to reduce his lead considerably in the closing stages.
