With McLaren and Ferrari battling hard for the Constructors’ title last year, Oscar Piastri and Carlos Sainz had quite a few battles on the track, with one particularly ending ugly. They had a collision in Miami last season when Sainz lost the rear of his Ferrari while attempting to overtake the Australian for P4 into turn 17.
Sainz was deemed at fault for the incident as he picked up a five-second time penalty and one penalty point on his super license. That said, Piastri would definitely not have felt that justice was served as his car was badly damaged and he was forced into making a pit stop that dropped him down the order.
He eventually finished the race in 13th while Sainz finished in fifth after accounting for his penalty. With Piastri coming off worse against Sainz last year, some of the Australian fans ahead of this weekend’s race at Albert Park predicted that the McLaren driver may consider the Spaniard his biggest enemy.
The conversation began during a fan event when Piastri was asked about his best enemy. While the 23-year-old began to think about the same, some of the crowd shouted “Carlos“. Piastri too acknowledged that they had their moments on track last year but insisted that they had made up.
oscar: my best enemy?
crowd: carlos!
oscar: (nods) carlos and i had our moments on track but we’ve made up now. we actually flew together to bahrain for pre-season testing so we’ve become… i still don’t know if friends is the right word for anyone on the grid, but NOT enemies. pic.twitter.com/Y2MIJnkEdu— yoyo (@williamssainz) March 14, 2025
“Carlos and I had our moments on track but we’ve made up now,” Piastri said. “We actually flew together to Bahrain for pre-season testing“. However, he was cautious to label their changed relationship as becoming friends.
“I still don’t know if friends is the right word for anyone on the grid, but NOT enemies,” he said about his relationship with Sainz now. Considering how fierce the competition is in F1, it makes sense why Piastri would be hesitant to label any of the drivers as friends.
But when it comes to his relationship with Sainz in particular, they indeed do seem to have come a long way after they had an angry exchange back in 2023 following a first-lap crash at Spa.
Both Piastri and Sainz blamed each other for the collision
As it so often happens in F1, whenever a collision takes place, rarely any driver admits fault. A similar incident transpired back in 2023 at the Belgian GP when Sainz and Piastri made contact heading into the first corner, which ended both their races.
Sainz claimed that it was Piastri’s supposed lack of experience that resulted in them colliding as he had never seen any driver make an attempt to overtake in that fashion into turn one. However, Piastri was going to have none of that.
The Australian stated that he had no idea what Sainz was doing and that the Spaniard “turned in like I didn’t exist“. However, since it was a first-lap incident between the two drivers when several were scrambling for positions, the stewards deemed it as just a racing incident and did not penalize any of the two.
Sadly for fans, it seems unlikely that the two will have any more such battles after Sainz moved to Williams — which is likely to be a backmarker — this year.
