Oscar Piastri has explained that McLaren's controversial Italian GP team order to benefit Lando Norris was on his mind during a terrible Azerbaijan performance.
At Monza, Norris and Piastri were running second and third, with the Australian decidedly a step behind his team-mate all weekend, when McLaren opted to pit Piastri first to cover off the threat from Charles Leclerc behind.
However, when Norris stopped, he suffered a slow tyre change which allowed Piastri to undercut his team-mate, with the two swapping around.
McLaren then instructed Piastri to cede position to Norris, with the championship leader protesting that he believed the team had agreed that a slow pit-stop "was a part of racing", but eventually waved Norris through, and was then allowed to attack once again, but did not get close enough to do so.
The result was Norris trimming Piastri's points lead to 31, but in Baku, Piastri suffered an awful weekend, with his woes starting with an engine problem in FP1.
He then crashed in qualifying and started ninth, but jumped the start and fell to the rear of the field before crashing later on the first lap.
Since winning the Dutch GP, Piastri has finished on the podium once in six races, the third at Monza, and has finished fifth in the last three races, as Norris has racked up two wins and a second, including a Sprint win.
The result is that after the Brazilian GP, with three rounds remaining, Norris has 390 points to Piastri's 366, a 24-point advantage with 83 remaining in the season.
Reflecting on the Baku weekend, Piastri has explained how the Monza team order was playing on his mind, but did not directly apportion blame for the Baku performance on what happened in Italy.
"Ultimately, [it was] a combination of quite a few things," Piastri explained on F1's Beyond the Grid podcast about his Baku weekend.
"Obviously, the race before that was Monza, which I didn't feel was a particularly great weekend from my own performance, and there was obviously what happened with the pit-stops.
"But then also Baku itself, Friday was tough. Things weren't working; I was overdriving. I wasn't very happy with how I was driving, and ultimately, probably trying to make up for that a little bit on Saturday.
"There were some things in the lead-up 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.
"Then I was driving not that well, we were on C6 tyres that weekend, which are now notoriously tricky to handle. There were just a lot of little things that eventually kind of added up.
"I felt like on Saturday, my pace was good, but I was just trying a little too hard, and ultimately, I think that led to the crash in qualifying, and then the race was a combination of a few things, like starting further back and wanting to make up for the day before.
"Reacting to something in the shift lights for the jumpstart, and trying to pinpoint which of those was the cause and effect, we'll never know, but ultimately, Baku was the perfect storm of quite a few things. It was a pretty terrible weekend.
"I look back on it now, and there is no beating around, it was the worst weekend I've ever had in racing, but probably the most useful."
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