Piastri cheeky after Stroll’s ‘concertina effect’ comment in China

Oscar Piastri was cheeky after Lance Stroll’s hit on Daniel Ricciardo in F1 Chinese GP, which damaged and hampered his race.

While Visa Cash App RB’s Ricciardo and Aston Martin’s Stroll perished straight up in F1 Chinese GP, McLaren’s Piastri also suffered from damage after getting hit on his diffuser from his countryman. His pace dropped soon after that as could be seen.

He was passed by not just Mercedes’ George Russell but also Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso to drop to eighth. Post-race, Piastri had a cheeky message for Stroll, who put the incident down to a concertina effect rather than his fault.

“Very hard, I looked at the car afterwards, at my diffuser, I’m pretty sure that’s not how the engineers designed it,” started Piastri. So, yeah it’s unsurprising that I lost so much pace from that point, which is a shame because I think some good points were on offer.

“Yes, but everyone else didn’t crash into each other. I mean, I think in that kind of corner you always kind of need to expect that. It did get quite close between us in that corner,” summed Piastri, after hearing of what Stroll thought about the incident.

Team boss Andrea Stella revealed that Piastri lost four tenths per lap after the damage, which left him vulnerable and it was handy that he managed to keep ahead of Lewis Hamilton towards the end of the race when the Brit was catching him.

“It was a big loss,” said Stella. “Oscar had damage on the diffuser. He lost a significant amount of rear downforce equivalent to I would say 4 tenths of a second. So when we heard the numbers, I wasn’t very optimistic that we could have hold positions like Oscar has been able to do.

“So, I think even if his result obviously is less noticeable than Lando’s, I think he did a good job in trying to understand how to drive the car when he lost so much rear downforce. The car was very oversteery obviously, because you lose downforce on the rear axle, but he managed to make some adaptations and keep Hamilton behind. So, that’s also a strong result.”

Here’s the crash: https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/video.2024-chinese-grand-prix-drama-on-the-restart-as-stroll-hits-ricciardo-and-magnussen-knocks-out-tsunoda.1796933926415904131.html

Here’s Lando Norris on VSC and lack of fight from Sergio Perez

Here’s Daniel Ricciardo, Lance Stroll on their incident

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