Piastri denies his MCL38 would be illegal

Having secured his second F1 victory, McLaren driver Oscar Piastri is fully confident that his car is legal despite recent onboard footage that indicated that the rear wing of the MCL38 achieves fairly high degree of flexibility in Baku.

Oscar Piastri won the Baku race after having been able to fend off a series of attacks from Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc.

Although the two teams appeared to have used similar downforce level at Baku, the Monegasque was unable to retake the lead despite using his DRS on the 2.2km start-finish full-throttle section where the DRS zone was extended by 100m compared to the previous season.

Footage from the rear-facing onboard camera showed that the upper flap of the MCL38’s rear wing was distorting under load, with the most visible aspect of this being the outer leading edge of the upper flap which tilts upwards as speed builds.

Asked in Singapore whether McLaren has been using some illegal parts on its car, the Australian said that he is fully confident that the MCL38 is in compliance with the technical regulations.

“Is it too much fuss about a few millimetres? Well, I mean, it’s legal. So yeah, as long as it passes all the tests. We get tested a lot, and it passes. So yeah, I mean, it’s certainly not the magic ticket or magic bullet for why we’re competitive. But it’s legal. It passes all the tests. So I’m pretty happy with it.”

Pushed on to explain when he first saw his rear wing flex under load, Piastri said that he detected the behaviour of the wing in Baku.

“To be honest, the first time I knew it did that was the same time as everyone else last week. And it’s not a grey area. It gets tested every week. It’s legal. They’ve got a lot of different tests for the rear wings now.

“So, yeah, I honestly didn’t even know that it did that until three days ago. So, yeah, obviously in the sport you find every bit of performance that you can without breaking the rules. And, you know, I feel like that’s what we’re doing. And that’s what you need to do to become a championship winning car and championship winning team.”

The now two-time F1 race winner insisted that it is normal that the most competitive cars are under more scrutiny than less competitive machines.

“To be honest, I think it’s natural. I think you look at any car that’s been competitive and it always gets scrutinised to the highest level. You look at the Mercedes a few years ago with their rear wing and the infamous 50K touch. You know, you look at a lot of the teams trying to work out Red Bull’s DRS effect for the last couple of years.

“You know, we’ve seen flexi front wings in the past and all sorts, so I think naturally, you know, there’s going to be scrutiny of just people curious to know why your car is competitive. So, I certainly don’t think it’s personal to us. You know, all the other teams are trying to find, including ourselves, we’re not just thinking that we’re the best out there and we don’t need to learn anything from anyone else.

“You know, we’re always looking at the other teams as well. So I think it’s only natural and when you’re at the front and when you have a car within a second of you for 30 laps and the rear wing camera on there for 30 laps, then naturally people are going to notice it more too,” Piastri said.