Martin Brundle explains why Oscar Piastri is an engineer’s dream during Dutch Grand Prix

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Oscar Piastri will not look back at the 2024 Dutch Grand Prix with an awful lot of fondness.

McLaren entered the summer break knowing they had a real opportunity to catch Red Bull in the Constructors’ Championship and even had an outside of securing the Drivers’ Championship through Lando Norris.

Norris held up his end of the bargain, securing pole position, the fastest lap, his second F1 victory and the Driver of the Day vote.

However, Oscar Piastri failed to finish on the podium and will be wondering if he should have locked out the front row of the grid on Saturday.

Piastri pinpointed exactly what went wrong at the Dutch Grand Prix for him and will want to avoid a repeat of that performance at Monza next weekend.

Speaking on Sky Sports F1, Martin Brundle wanted to find some positives for the Australian among the ‘bad day at the office’ he suffered.

Brundle didn’t want to sugarcoat the fact that Piastri should have performed better across the weekend.

But given he’s still relatively inexperienced, Brundle noticed something over the McLaren team radio that highlighted why so many people think the 23-year-old could be a future world champion one day.

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Martin Brundle explains why Oscar Piastri is a race engineer’s dream after disappointing Dutch Grand Prix

Going into the final 15 laps of the race with Piastri struggling to overtake Charles Leclerc, Brundle said: “Oscar will be thoroughly unhappy with this being 23 seconds at the moment behind Norris.”

On the radio, Piastri was asked how his tyres were and said: “Not amazing, but it’ll make it to the end.”

Brundle continued: “He’ll never make a script writer for advertising Oscar, it’s just what you need as an engineer.”

Sky Sports co-commentator David Croft added: “He plays everything down and he’s just so level-headed. His demeanour, it barely changes, to the extent that he was racing around with a broken rib and we didn’t even notice because he’s that laid back anyway!”

After the race, Brundle reflected further on Piastri’s race and said: “He did show tremendous pace when he was catching up and soon dispatched George Russell and then stalled out behind Leclerc who was driving really well.

“Oscar will look at that and no doubt, there’s a lot to learn. That was a bad day in the office for Oscar Piastri, from third on the grid to fourth and 27 seconds behind his teammate is a bad day.”

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Damon Hill says Oscar Piastri reminds him of a triple F1 world champion

Piastri is going to have off days at this stage of his career and while he’s finishing ahead of Sergio Perez, he’s still helping McLaren in their quest to beat Red Bull in the Constructors’ Championship.

Norris is the outstanding candidate to beat Verstappen in the Drivers’ Championship now and it might not be long until Piastri is asked to support his teammate in his bid to become the first McLaren driver since Lewis Hamilton to win the title.

However, next season McLaren will expect to be in the title fight from the first race in Australia with the current regulations unlikely to significantly change.

The Australian may see that as an opportunity to challenge Norris and Damon Hill thinks Piastri is similar to a former world champion who could inspire his title bid.

That’s an issue that Andrea Stella and Zak Brown may face next year but it’s a very nice problem to have.