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Ted Kravitz has questioned McLaren CEO Zak Brown’s reaction to Oscar Piastri’s heartbreaking crash that ended his Australian Grand Prix before he had even reached the grid.
As the cars were filing out of the pit lane, preparing to head to the grid, shocked fans at the Australian Grand Prix could be heard reacting to something happening on the exit of turn four.
When the cameras finally cut to the scene of the accident, all that could be seen was a distraught Oscar Piastri with his head in his hands and a destroyed McLaren car.
Some standout performers in Melbourne 👀 Who was you Driver of the Day at the Australian GP?
Anthony Davidson came up with a theory for Piastri’s accident, but the Australian later explained what went wrong.
Piastri ‘mainly’ blamed himself for the mistake made on cold tyres, although he admitted he received a surge of battery power that he didn’t expect after initial deployment issues when he left the McLaren garage.
READ MORE: McLaren driver Oscar Piastri’s life outside F1 from height to girlfriend
Ted Kravitz ‘puzzled’ by how Zak Brown reacted to Oscar Piastri crashing out of the Australian Grand Prix
It means the wait for an Australian to finish on the podium at a home race continues, with Piastri well-placed in P5 to challenge the top three on Sunday.
Speaking on Ted’s Notebook from inside the Melbourne paddock, Ted Kravitz shared his reaction to the incident and how Zak Brown explained away Piastri’s error.
He said: “I can only just feel so sorry for everybody, all the Oscar fans out there and for him and his family.
“It just really hit me hard that did, the Oscar thing. It really did. I was just gutted about it.
“I’ll tell you what was happening, actually. And what did you think of Zak Brown’s reaction?
DISASTER for Oscar Piastri! He crashes before the Australian Grand Prix has even started!
“He was like, ‘OK, you know, yeah, I’m unhappy about it, but we’ve got to dust ourselves off.’
“I was a bit puzzled about it before. I thought that it was obviously a sort of coping mechanism.
“He was kind of OK, but I think it was a coping mechanism when Oscar went out.
“That he was like, ‘Well, you know, we got to pick ourselves up and carry on with the other car that we’ve got.’”
READ MORE: Lewis Hamilton reveals he ‘called’ Toto Wolff and Zak Brown looking for answers after F1 testing
Lando Norris on where McLaren need to improve after the Australian Grand Prix
Every team is still trying to collect as much data as possible from every session, even during Grand Prix races when the main focus is on scoring as many points as possible.
As soon as Piastri crashed, that left Lando Norris as the sole McLaren driver capable of providing Andrea Stella’s team with insight into how a race under F1’s new regulations is going to play out.
McLaren are currently the third or fourth-best team on the grid, and when asked about potential improvements coming down the line, Norris said in his official post-race debrief: “This is not something that is going to happen overnight or in one or two weeks’ time.
“I don’t know what the gap was, 50 [seconds]? Almost a second a lap off, not quite like that. Some of that is still understanding the PU, some of it is just a better car.
“Ferrari, from what we can see, have the better car. For us to match that is zero chance at the moment. The more we can learn, the more we can understand and the better we can be.”
Piastri dismissed that Brown is a villain during the build-up to the race weekend based on people’s opinions about papaya rules and how the team were portrayed on Drive to Survive last season.
However, it will be interesting to see how he reacts to Brown’s own reaction to a nightmare start to the 2026 season for the Australian.
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