Piastri’s pursuit of Leclerc delayed by Stroll “driving like it was his first go-kart race” · RaceFans

Oscar Piastri was unimpressed with Lance Stroll’s driving when he lapped him during the Italian Grand Prix.

The pair crossed paths as Piastri was closing on Leclerc in the final stint of the race. Piastri fell short of catching the race winner by 2.6 seconds and blamed Stroll for costing him a significant chunk of time.

Piastri began chasing Leclerc after making his second visit to the pits, while Leclerc ran to the end on a single stop. The McLaren driver first had to overtake Leclerc’s team mate Carlos Sainz Jnr for position, then lost more time putting Stroll a lap down.

“I asked basically straight away what pace I needed to do to go and get Charles,” he said. “And the pace I needed was basically what I did for the first few laps.

“At that point, I was pretty optimistic. [But] I lost a decent amount of time behind Carlos. You had Stroll driving like it was his first go-kart race. I don’t know what went through his brain when he saw his blue flag. That cost another second.

“I needed that stint to be perfect to win that race and those little things are ultimately what cost us a bit of a chance.

“It would have been a long shot anyway but it was certainly not far off from being able to achieve it. I was pushing flat out to try and do it, I couldn’t have gone any faster than that, just came up a bit short.”

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Piastri is unsure whether McLaren could have emulated Ferrari’s one-stop strategy and not given up the lead of the race due to the graining they saw some drivers experience on the hard tyres.

“For me, it was a big risk to do that,” he said. “The graining of the tyres has been a big topic all weekend.

“In practice, once you got graining, it was basically game over. Even in the first stint on the mediums it was pretty difficult.

“When we made the second stop, for myself, my front-left tyre was pretty heavily grained and I was going slower and slower. So it seemed like a sensible decision to pit again.

“I guess nobody really expected the graining to clear up on Charles’ [tyres], from what I heard. So, in hindsight, clearly stopping once was the right thing to do. But from that point in the race with all the information that we’d gathered through the weekend, it seemed incredibly risky.”

He pointed out Leclerc could afford to risk not pitting a second time as he was unlikely to finish lower than the…