McLaren’s Oscar Piastri believes he could have beaten Charles Leclerc to pole position for tomorrow’s Monaco Grand Prix had he not lost time in the final sector of his quickest lap.
Piastri missed out on the most prestigious pole of the season by a tenth of a second despite improving on his final attempt in qualifying.
The McLaren driver was level with Leclerc’s pole time as he entered the tunnel on his final push lap and was up by 0.13s on his first Q3 time, but ended the lap having improved by just 0.020s on his first lap, losing out to Leclerc by 0.154s at the end. Piastri admitted he may have been able to get close to pole position had he had a better end to his final push lap.
“I think if you took the second half of my first lap in Q3 and the first half of the second one, it would have been enough,” he said. “Just a couple of mistakes at the end.
“But credit to Charles – he’s been incredibly quick all weekend. At certain points I don’t think anyone thought we were going to get close to him. So it’s nice to be starting on the front row.”
Piastri’s team are running a special livery in tribute to Ayrton Senna, the most successful driver in the history of the Monaco Grand Prix. “I feel like it’s been a good weekend in terms of building momentum and what better colours to do it in than these,” he added.
It was the second time in seven days that Piastri missed out on his first career grand prix pole position by a small margin. He was beaten by Max Verstappen last weekend in Imola, then demoted to fifth on the grid after a post-session penalty for impeding.
Asked if beating Leclerc to victory tomorrow was a matter of getting ahead of him into Sainte Devote or beaten Ferrari on strategy, Piastri replied “A bit of both.”
“A good start always helps and if you can get into the lead, then you can control it very easily around here,” he continued. “So that’s probably the first goal.
“If not, then with strategy. Because as optimistic as I want to be, overtaking around here is not easy. So we’ll try our best, both starting from a good spot. A chance for a good day tomorrow.”
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2024 Monaco Grand Prix
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