Oscar Piastri said he needed a bit of luck to win the Miami Grand Prix after compromising his race in qualifying.
He looked on course for pole position when he set the quickest time in Q2 yesterday, but fell to fourth on the grid. However he rebounded in the race, moving ahead of team mate Lando Norris on the first lap, then passing Andrea Kimi Antonelli and Max Verstappen to win.
While Norris came in second, McLaren had half a minute in hand over their rivals at the finish. Afterwards Piastri admitted the race had turned in his favour.
“I think this weekend was not my best, and a lot of that was yesterday,” said Piastri in a post-race press conference. “The race today was pretty solid, but yesterday I was pretty frustrated with my performance.
“Ultimately, yes, I won the race this weekend, but I think the likelihood of winning many races [after] qualifying fourth is pretty low. I did a lot of things right today, but there was definitely some good fortune there as well, and a very quick car. I don’t want to rely on that every single Sunday.”
McLaren are unlikely to enjoy the kind of advantage they had in Miami at many other tracks, Piastri believes.
“Clearly, this is the exception to the pace we’ve had this year,” he said. “Yes, we’ve always had a strong car, but the pace we had today from lap one it felt like was unexpected, even for us.
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“I’ll definitely take the performance and we’ll try and work out how to do that every weekend, but there’s still definitely things to work on from a personal side and from a team point of view.”
Piastri moved up to third at the start when Norris went off at turn two trying to pass Verstappen. He then overtook Antonelli, whom Piastri said “was very nice to me and didn’t make life very tough.”
“[It’s] nice when you race against people who identify when someone’s quicker and don’t make the race more difficult for both of us,” he added. “So that was nice of him.”
However he had a much harder time taking the lead off Verstappen. “Obviously, for Max, leading the race, a different story. But I knew to expect that.”
“It was tough at the beginning trying to get past Max,” he explained. “I tried pretty hard to get past, with everything still on my car. It was not easy but I picked my moments when I needed to.
“I could tell that we had a lot of pace from the get-go today, and it was going to be a matter of when I got past, not if. But I wanted to do it as efficiently as I could because I knew once Lando got back behind me, he was going to be catching us a lot. I wanted to get through quickly but cleanly.
“I felt like I did a pretty good job of that, then built a gap. Maybe not the strongest second half of the race of my life, but I think building that gap and being quick at the right times was what I needed.”
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