In a wet field of grass there Oscar Piastri sat, the man in orange marooned by his spinning wheels. The Australian driver – after a rapid rise in Formula One – was all of a sudden stationary.
The expectations of F1 mean that those not moving forward are going backward. Sure enough, the hometown hero tumbled down the order, from a podium sure-thing, cascading through the points to a place among the back markers. And as his position sank, so too did the hearts of local fans, in a flash of disappointment now all too familiar.
No Australian has stood on the podium at his home grand prix across a decade in Adelaide and now three in Victoria. For most of a compelling opening weekend of Formula One, Melbourne’s best driver looked certain to end that run.
McLaren appeared a class above the rest of the field in the middle stages of Sunday’s race. For a moment, Piastri even looked sharper than his team-mate Lando Norris, the pole-sitter, early leader and eventual winner.
On a drying track, the heavens seemed to have the Australian’s back too. He skipped past defending driver’s champion Max Verstappen and onto the rear wing of Norris. But in Formula One, the team principal is a power higher than God.
The Australian confirmed afterwards a 2025 edition “papaya rules” were in place, and at that stage he was not allowed to challenge. “By the time we were free to race, I’d killed my front left a little bit getting to the back of Lando, so by that point, there wasn’t much I could do,” Piastri said.
Given the speed of the orange cars, the approach of McLaren chief executive Zak Brown could determine this year’s Formula One champion. Piastri is sensible enough to play down the controversy of team dynamics, saying afterwards it was a “minor moment”. But he added he did not understand the instructions.
“Today’s race and the circumstances were pretty extreme, approaching back-markers, [with] one dry line, not knowing there was supposed to be rain to come,” Piastri said. “So I’ll speak to the team and try and understand better what the thinking was, but I think it’s always clear that those kind of calls can come in either direction.”
After losing precious seconds trying to go forward out of the grass, the Australian – who would recover and make a series of daring passes in the dying stages to finish in ninth place – finally found traction by reversing his McLaren out.
“I tried to go forwards, and couldn’t,” he said. “Good thing I spent some time in the off-season trying to learn how to reverse a tractor on Jeremy Clarkson’s farm. I think it came in handy today.”
Piastri had visited the British TV presenter’s property late last year, underlining his growing status in the world of Formula One. And there is no place that highlights his popularity like Melbourne.
The 23-year-old grew up 15 minutes away in Brighton and noticed the thousands of orange ponchos that populated the grandstands on a day that – despite incessant rain – secured a record crowd for the four-day event of 465,498.
“It’s nice to be, I guess, the the home hero,” Piastri said. “It’s something you kind of dream of as a kid racing at home, being the one that most people support, so it’s really special.”
Fans braved the rain on a day that very much ended the driest summer Victoria had seen for a decade. More than 15mm of rain fell in Melbourne between 9am and the end of the race, and what was not underneath Piastri’s tyres when he spun out on lap 44 pooled around the vast Albert Park precinct.
A truck with a 2000 litre tank spent the day hoovering up the water around the fan areas, and had to be emptied 12 times by lunchtime. One particularly stubborn puddle outside the Red Bull hospitality building had VIPs wishing they had wings.
With six rookies on the track, and the wet conditions, there was some concern about how the race may play out. Lewis Hamilton’s father Anthony wished on the broadcast that everyone would get through the race unscathed. Yet on the formation lap one of F1’s fresh faces, Racing Bulls’ Isack Hadjar, found the wall on turn two in an embarrassing start to his career.
If Hadjar’s rear wing was bent at 45 degrees, his pride was in even worse shape as he wandered back up the paddock. His helmet was bowed, his stride listless and he had one hand on his helmet’s face. He resembled a football mascot feigning a giggle, but in reality was a Formula One laughing stock. Escorting him was Hamilton senior, the man who had jinxed him minutes beforehand. By the time he reached the press, the 20-year-old was sullen. “I would say I have a strong chin, but this one definitely hits pretty hard,” Hadjar said.
After the disappointment of his own race, Piastri was more upbeat. “Clearly it will hurt for a period of time, but I’m still happy with the job that I did, apart from that one lap,” he said. Of that cursed grass, he could afford a smile and joked that Albert Park’s staff needed to mow it “just a couple of inches shorter.”
