Oscar Piastri reveals when he suffered a broken rib in the hard F1 triple header and how the seat likely contributed to it.
During the summer break, McLaren’s Piastri revealed about suffering from a broken rib in the heat of the three rounds before the shutdown. He was laying down his achievements while driving with an injury which he seemingly got around Spain and Austria.
It amplified at the onset of the three rounds in British GP. And he drove with pain in Hungary and Belgium races that followed. Impressively in the five races with suspected injury, he finished seventh, second, fourth, first and second, respectively.
Piastri reckons the issue stemmed from the positioning of his seat in the car which McLaren eventually fixed. The Australian too is fine after recovering during the summer break. “Just from driving, I mean, you could say we put so much downforce on the car… but no, just from driving,” he said to media when asked about the whereabouts.
“You make the seat, obviously, at the start of the year and sometimes you get it a little bit wrong. Some tracks don’t expose it, but I think going from Barcelona, Austria, Silverstone, three pretty hardcore tracks. So it was just a bit of a pressure point which eventually my rib gave up. But it’s all good again now and we’ve changed a seat and fixed it immediately pretty much.
“So yeah, all back to normal. The scan was the day after Silverstone but it was definitely broken before Silverstone. Three, I would say [that I raced with the broken ribs]. But yes, definitely it was at some point around Austria. I think it was probably a bit disturbed in Barcelona, and then with Austria afterwards it was pretty painful, so it was pretty nasty for a few days.
“But we made some changes and it was already getting better even with driving, so it’s all good,” summed up Piastri, who noted that he couldn’t do much with his training to adjust. It was painful in Silverstone, but it started to get better following that.
“Not massively [we can do with training],” said Piastri. “I think we identified what we could change on the seat and, even with it being broken, the pain subsided a lot once we changed a few things. Even with driving around Budapest and Spa it was not getting any worse, it was actually getting better, so I think we already changed what went wrong.”
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