Bernie Collins ‘surprised’ by Zak Brown’s nonchalant response to Oscar Piastri’s Australia crash

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Zak Brown planned to carry out a ‘postmortem after the race’ when Oscar Piastri crashed on his Australian Grand Prix warmup lap. Bernie Collins has questioned the lack of urgency from the McLaren CEO.

Piastri left the Albert Park crowd devastated when he slammed into the barriers on his lap to the grid, something that’s almost unheard of in dry conditions. He lit up the rear of his MCL40 on the exit of turn four and the resulting impact left him with terminal damage.

Speaking to Sky Sports’ Martin Brundle on the grid, Brown said the crash wasn’t an immediate concern.

How do you expect Oscar Piastri to respond to his Australian GP crash at the Chinese GP?

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“We’ve not seen anything on the data so far,” he said. “He didn’t say anything on the radio, so we’ll do a postmortem after the race and see what happened.

“For now, we have to focus on the car we’ve got in the race and get the excitement level back up. That’s definitely disappointing for Oscar at his home race, but let’s see what happens now.”

Bernie Collins says McLaren had to figure out Oscar Piastri crash ‘very quickly’

Ted Kravitz was ‘puzzled’ by Brown’s reaction and Bernie Collins expressed similar sentiments on the F1 Show. She can understand that the American was trying to improve the mood, but is certain that there were ‘frantic’ checks taking place.

Piastri reported a sudden spike in his battery levels before the violent snap of oversteer, and there was a risk that Lando Norris would face the same problem. That made it critical to investigate.

Norris ultimately finished fifth, holding off Max Verstappen but crossing the line some 51.7 seconds behind race-winner George Russell.

“I was surprised,” Collins said of Brown’s comments. “I can get that Zak was trying to be positive for the other driver, there’s no point worrying too much about what’s happened, when you need to go through that later.

“In a new era of cars, a new era of regulations, there must have been a lot of engineers beavering away in the background to figure out if it was a car fault or a driver fault, because the worst thing you can do is send your second driver out at risk of something.

“You need to figure out very quickly if there’s a change you can make to the second car on the grid. He seemed to suggest that wasn’t happening. I can only imagine it was, that there were lots of people trying to frantically figure out if there was an issue with the car.”

‘The engineers need to be on it’ – Bernie Collins recounts Oscar Piastri radio before crash

In a precursor to Piastri’s problem, Collins says McLaren were trying to improve their first-sector battery management during qualifying.

When the home favourite left the pits before Sunday’s race, he had no electrical power at all. It suddenly arrived at turn four, catching him off guard.

The incident underlines just how inexperienced the drivers and their engineers are with the new cars despite completing hundreds of laps in testing. In the future, the McLaren pit wall should be able to prevent a repeat.

“In qualifying, I heard one of the McLaren drivers told that he had 100% of his battery at turn four, and in order to prevent that, he should go on throttle earlier on the start/finish straight. That’s very different to what we had before, that what you’re doing a few straights earlier is affecting how you’re braking in turn four.

“In this instance, out of the pit lane, he’s immediately complaining about having nothing in his battery, no deployment from his battery whatsoever. It seems to charge going into the corner and then he gets much more power on exit than what he expecting.

“I think, because he’s had a few corners of worrying that there was nothing in the battery and then suddenly when he’s charged on exit in that corner, he does get some battery assistance, that’s one of the aspects of why he had that off.

“This is going to take a lot of management from teams and drivers. The engineers on the pit wall need to be on it to tell these guys, ‘This is what’s happening’, but it’s a learning curve for everyone.”

Piastri wasn’t the only driver who had an unusual crash during the Melbourne weekend. Verstappen was a passenger when he found the barriers in qualifying, with Red Bull unable to provide a clear explanation.