Piastri took turn three at a slow, cautious pace. But he put his foot down at turn four, his car riding the outside kerb aggressively before pirouetting on cold tyres into a 180-degree spin, the right-hand side of his car clouting the outside barrier on the run to turn five.
The circuit’s medical car was deployed to assess Piastri’s condition, but the Australian was able to extract himself from his McLaren and returned to the pit lane via a marshal’s scooter, his helmet remaining on, in no mood to discuss his home heartbreak.
The fallout
With McLaren aghast as its lead driver in Melbourne crashed out before he could take up his fifth place on the grid, McLaren CEO Zak Brown was initially at a loss for answers.
“We’ve not seen anything on the data so far or the radio,” Brown said.
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“We’ll do a post-mortem after the race. For now, we’ve got to focus on the car we’ve got in the race [Lando Norris].
“[Piastri] will be sore about that one for a while, but he’s a race car driver who knows how to recover quickly. He’ll be back.”
When Norris asked what had happened to his teammate, he was told over team radio: “he lost it on the exit kerb at turn four, doing a shift”.
Sky Sports analyst and former F1 driver Anthony Davidson felt, on initial analysis, that both Piastri’s car and its operator were to blame.
“There’s clearly some level of driver error as well,” the Briton said.
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