Why Aussie F1 curse could ‘come back to bite’ Piastri after McLaren’s horror start

Oscar Piastri’s Formula 1 chance is at risk of being wasted on a bad career move to McLaren, according to Karun Chandhok.

Piastri made his long-awaited F1 debut at the weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix, but his race lasted only 13 laps before his car was retired with an electrical problem.

Teammate Lando Norris finished last and two laps down thanks to an air pressure leak that forced him to pit five times in the 57-lap grand prix.

Hopes that McLaren could consolidate its place near the top of the midfield this season were downplayed significantly as early as the launch of the MCL60 in February, and at the start of pre-season testing CEO Zak Brown admitted that key development targets had been missed.

After finishing third in the 2020 championship, McLaren has moved only backwards, finishing fourth in 2021 and fifth last season.

Meanwhile, Piastri’s former Alpine team appears on track to challenge for the top-midfield spot after Pierre Gasly recovered from 20th on the grid to score points in ninth.

Speaking ahead of the season-opening race, Chandhok said it was difficult to escape the feeling that the Melburnian was following the well-worn path of Australians choosing the wrong teams at the wrong times.

“I’m slightly concerned that Oscar Piastri’s following in the trend of Australian drivers making career choices that could come back to bite them,” he told the Sky Sports F1 Podcast.

“Alan Jones going to Beatrice Haas, Mark Webber choosing Williams over Renault in 2005 as he watched (Fernando) Alonso romp to the title when he had the option to go there, and obviously the recently well-documented saga of Daniel Ricciardo’s struggles.”

Jones was coaxed out of his second retirement to race for the ill-fated Haas team — of no relation to the current team of the same name — from which he returned a stunning 14 retirements and just four points from 19 starts before he quit F1 for good.

He later revealed that he was contacted by Ferrari partway through 1982 following the death of Gilles Villeneuve but gave the Italian team the run-around. Ferrari won the 1982 and 1983 constructors titles.

Webber was being lined up by manager and Renault team principal Flavio Briatore for a move to the French team in 2005 to partner Alonso, but the Queanbeyan native had given his heart to the legend of the Williams team.

Alonso and Renault won double championships in 2005 and 2006, while Webber described his Williams tenure as “the lowest time in my entire F1 career”.

Ricciardo’s decision to switch from Renault to McLaren before the first race of 2020 is likely to go down as the move that killed a career that once seemed destined for world titles.

“So I’m slightly concerned for Oscar,” Chandhok summarised. “I’ve known him a little bit and speak to his engineers at Prema, who he was with in F2 and F3, and in fact they went to the point of saying that he was better than (Charles) Leclerc when they had Leclerc at Prema and that he was genuinely the best young talent to come through junior formulas since Max Verstappen.”

But Chandhok cautioned that Piastri’s reputation would only get him so far in machinery that won’t allow him to carve a name for himself.

“It’s more you just get hidden, you just get forgotten,” he said.

“If you think of Lewis (Hamilton’s) impact when he arrived in F1, it was instantaneous because he was in with a top team. I still maintain it’s one of the greatest rookie seasons we’ve ever seen, 2007, what he did that year.

“But he was at the forefront. We were all watching him at the front. If you get buried at the bottom end of the field, you can be a bit anonymous. It’s hard to make an impact.

“I hope it works out for him, because it’s not looking good for McLaren so far.”