Oscar Piastri apologised to Alex Albon and Williams after a Lap 13 collision at the Canadian Grand Prix left the British-Thai driver out of the race and cost the McLaren driver 10 seconds in the stewards’ hands.
Albon had started from P18 and picked up places early, only for his afternoon to end when Piastri locked up and ran into the side of the Williams. Piastri finished P11 and outside the points, while Albon became one of six retirements in Montreal.
For Albon, the hit came just as the weekend finally began to come together. He said the race was the first time all weekend that the car started to feel more comfortable, and he believed points were there to be taken. “Yeah, not ideal,” he said of the crash, adding that it was “unfortunate” and “not ideal” and that points were definitely possible on the day.
Piastri said there was no intent behind the move. “But yeah, obviously the damage was a shame, and apologies to Alex and to Williams because it certainly wasn’t intentional. I just locked up and went into the side of him,” he said. He described the afternoon as “one of those days” and said there was little to salvage from it.
The Australian’s race was also shaped by McLaren’s tyre call before the start. Both cars went to the grid on intermediate tyres, but the decision quickly unravelled and forced both drivers to pit for slicks within the first two laps. Piastri said the ground had got “a fair bit wetter” between the anthem and getting into the car, and that reaching the grid on slicks had become “a massive challenge.”
That left McLaren playing it conservatively on a changing track, and Piastri said the team had been “too safe in some ways” and that it was “one to review.” He added that it did not look especially wet and was not that wet in the end, but that the call still needed a proper look. The contrast was clear: one driver was left counting a missed points chance, the other was left explaining why a cautious approach still went wrong.
Albon, meanwhile, said he felt the team was losing track time at a moment when he badly needed it. He said he had not done many laps this year because of pit stops, retirements and other interruptions, a frustration that fits a season in which clean mileage has been hard to come by. The Canadian Grand Prix has now gone onto the growing list of weekends where one mistake or one bad break has wiped out a chance to build something useful.
For Piastri, the 10-second penalty and the apology close out one part of the story, but not the more important one. McLaren now has to decide whether it was too cautious before the start, while Albon leaves Montreal with a race that looked promising until Lap 13 ended it in the wall-side damage and a long walk back to the garage.
