Yahoo Autos Piastri dismisses Marko-led speculation about a Red Bull move
Oscar Piastri says a move to Red Bull is not on his horizon following comments from Helmut Marko linking him with a switch from McLaren.
According to German website F1-Insider, Marko claimed that former Red Bull driver Mark Webber – who is Piastri’s manager – has been pushing for talks about what the team might do with its driver line-up in future. However, when asked if that was a possibility for him in the coming years, Piastri refuted Marko’s claim.
“Definitely not, I’m very happy where I am,” Piastri said. “I’m under contract for the next two years after this, and I’m certainly not looking to go elsewhere.
“It wouldn’t be a week in F1 without some comments from Helmut. Not massively [surprised], I mean, it’s a nice compliment, I would say, but again, I’m very happy with where I am, and I think they have quite a big pool of drivers that they can choose from if they want to.”
The comments come amid a constructors’ championship fight between McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari, and Piastri is hopeful that the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez will be better-suited to his car at the Mexico City Grand Prix than the last race in the United States.
“It’s quite different in a lot of ways to Austin, obviously the altitude and stuff like that makes it quite a different challenge, but hopefully it helps and suits us a little bit more,” he said. “I don’t think we necessarily expected Austin to be… ‘painful’ is a bit of an exaggeration, but not as competitive as we hoped, but it wasn’t a complete surprise.
“I think we’ve got some good ideas about why qualifying was so tricky, looking back at the weekend. I think the race itself was actually quite positive, especially from 12 months ago, it was more or less the same, especially with the first stint I was going with Lando.
“The second stint, a few mistakes in the middle of that hard stint, but for 95% of the race we were a very even match. And I think even just as a team, our pace was actually quite strong, it was just that we were very slow at the start of the race, and then everyone built the gaps and that was kind of it for us.
“So I think it looked a little bit worse than it was, it’s just that with the competition being so tight, if you put a step wrong, then you go from being first and second to where we were in fourth and fifth. It’s just a very tight field at the moment.”
