Oscar Piastri has admitted that the order to yield to his teammate At Monza had an impact on his subsequent performances.

Having opted to extend both drivers opening stints, with Lando Norris running second and Piastri third, it was the Briton who had first call in terms of pitting. However, with Charles Leclerc having previously stopped and increasingly a threat to the Australian, Norris was asked if he would defer to his teammate. He agreed.

Piastri stopped on Lap 45 (of 53) while Norris stopped a lap later. Unfortunately, a problem with the left-front wheel-gun meant that Norris lost several seconds during the stop and emerged behind the Australian, both having now been passed by Max Verstappen who had pitted on Lap 37. It was then McLaren made the controversial decision to tell Piastri to hand the position back to his teammate.

At the time of the incident, the Australian made his frustration quite clear: "We said that a slow pit stop was part of racing," he argued with his engineer. "I don't really get what's changed here. But if you really want to do it then I'll do it."

He subsequently calmed down, though the incident continued to trouble his management and indeed fans, yet while the matter appeared settled, the Australian never seemed to fully regain his confidence and endured a string of disappointing performances, not least crashing out of qualifying in Baku and again in the race.

Speaking on the Beyond the Grid podcast, Piastri admits the affect that Monza had on him.

"Obviously, the race before that was Monza," he replies when asked about the Azerbaijan nightmare, "which I didn't feel was a particularly great weekend from my own performance and there was obviously what happened with the pitstops.

"But then also in Baku itself, Friday was tough, things weren't working, I was overdriving," he admits, "I wasn't very happy with how I was driving and ultimately probably trying to make up for that a little bit on Saturday.

"I think there was kind of some things in the lead-up, let's say, that were maybe not the most helpful and then things that happened on the weekend. We had an engine problem in FP1 that kind of unsettled things a bit, and then I was driving not that well. We were on C6 tyres that weekend, which are notoriously tricky to handle. There were just a lot of little things that eventually kind of added up.

"Ultimately, Baku was the perfect storm of quite a few things," he says. "Obviously, it was a pretty terrible weekend, but I think the amount of learning we had from that weekend, from a technical point of view, emotional point of view... there's no beating around the bush, that was the worst weekend I've ever had in racing, but probably the most useful in some ways. So, when you can start to look at things like that, normally that helps you out quite a lot.

"If you look at some of the names that have had some pretty shocking weekends, or almost unbelievable weekends or races or moments in their career where things have gone wrong; it happens to anyone.

"There's not one person in racing that doesn't have some kind of disastrous story of how a weekend went wrong for them. Looking at it from that perspective does help a lot, but you still need to learn the things you need to learn from weekends like that."

Let's hope that McLaren has learned also, though some insist that it hasn't.