Oscar Piastri's solid run to fifth in the Hungarian Grand Prix was hindered by a damaged floor on his McLaren MCL60 according to team boss Andrea Stella.
Following up on his fourth-place finish at Silverstone, Piastri claimed his second top-five in succession at the Hungaroring, a result that also marked the first time the Aussie has scored points in back-to-back races.
From fourth on the grid, the McLaren charger enjoyed a strong start to his afternoon, skillfully overtaking teammate Lando Norris and Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton at the first corner to slot into second where he remained for the duration of his 18-lap opening stint on the medium tyre.
Piastri then lost out to Norris who had executed a successful undercut by pitting a lap earlier than his teammate. From third, the Aussie lost ground, eventually succumbing to attacks from Red Bull's Sergio Perez and from Hamilton.
After the race, the 22-year-old reckoned that tyre degradation had been responsible for his dwindling pace.
"I think just tyre deg was the killer for me," he said. "Not 100 percent sure why yet, clearly something for me to look at.
"I think it’s one of the first races where I’ve had a race with so much deg, multiple pit stops, so there’s plenty for me to learn.
"But I think that was the sole key to my race; I think I made life easy for myself in the first stint, and then it kind of unraveled from there."
However, Stella suggested that Piastri's performance loss in the second part of the race was due to a damaged floor caused by the Aussie running a bit wide and hitting a kerb while battling Perez.
"Oscar is a guy that doesn’t look for excuses," Stella said. "We think the damage happened actually running wide on a kerb – not necessarily, and only, when he went off track while fighting with Perez.
"So there may be both times that this damage happened to the car.
"Running over the kerb definitely here in Hungary creates damage to the floor. This happened in free practice at some stage during the weekend.
"We see it because the floor is fully instrumented; there are a lot of pressure sensors and you can see the trace of these pressure sensors changes, so you see that something has happened.
"And then you also measure the forces acting on the car, and we could see this not only in the pressure sensors but also on the forces measured through the pushrods."
Overall, Piastri was pleased with his result, highlighting the fact that it had been achieved at the wheel of a slightly impaired car, which also spoke volumes about the quality of McLaren's development programme.
"Plenty of things to try and improve on but to have the struggles that I did and still come away with the top five is quite a nice position to be in," he said.
"To be racing against those guys, and on merit, two weekends in a row now is very exciting.
"To have this kind of track, these kinds of conditions – which were conditions of our nightmares at the start of the season or even a few races ago – it’s full credit to the team of the turnaround we’ve managed to make.
"To have the struggles that I did, compared to Lando, and still finish fifth highlights what a good job the team have been doing with the development of the car."
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