Oscar Piastri blames rib injury on badly-fitted F1 race seat

Oscar Piastri insists that a poorly-fitted F1 race seat caused his broken rib.

The McLaren driver revealed an X-ray during the summer break which showed he sustained the unknown injury earlier in the season.

Piastri even won his first-ever F1 grand prix in Hungary with the broken rib before he went public with it.

He has now claimed his race seat was the cause.

“You make the seat at the start of the year and sometimes you get it a little bit wrong,” Piastri said at Zandvoort ahead of this weekend’s F1 Dutch Grand Prix.

“Some tracks don't expose it. But I think going from Barcelona, Austria, Silverstone… three pretty hardcore tracks.

“It was just a bit of a pressure point which eventually gave up.

“But it's all good again now. We've changed the seat and fixed it immediately pretty much. So, all back to normal.”

Piastri said about his injury: “The scan was the day after Silverstone but it was definitely broken before Silverstone.”

That means he drove with the injury for three grands prix.

Changes have now been made to alleviate any pain he is still feeling.

“I think we identified what we could change on the seat,” Piastri said.

“Even with it being broken, the pain subsided a lot once we changed a few things.

“Even with driving around Budapest and Spa it was not getting any worse, it was actually getting better.”

McLaren enter the Dutch Grand Prix hoping to wrestle the initiative away from Mercedes, who have won three of the past four grands prix.

McLaren will still believe they currently have the fastest car in F1 as they bid to chase down Red Bull.