The past errors from McLaren champions that put Piastri's Baku blunder in good company

Oscar Piastri probably wished he'd stayed at home in the moment before his McLaren crunched the wall for the second time across the Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend.

From his power unit issue in FP1 (albeit one mitigated by the 25-minute red flag), the weekend snowballed with a near-miss in FP2, where he banged the Turn 15 Tecpro barrier, and a crash in qualifying at Turn 3. It then reached its denouement with his lap-one blunder at Turn 5 – after having already jumped the start.

As he observed the race from the side of the track, with a phone leaning against the barrier broadcasting the live feed, he surely wished the ground would swallow him up. Such was his luck, the ground might have done so, only to spit him back out again onto the Baku pavement.

Of course, many a pundit – or even commenter with a soapbox – started to question his credentials. One swallow does not maketh a summer. Three days of catastrophe does not spell 'game over'.

It's not the first time that a championship leader has had a 'mare' and, if anything, Piastri's absolute Weston (a super-mare, in West Country-speak) means less simply because the calendar is so much more expansive versus previous years. It doesn't make him any less of a driver to endure those moments – it's just an occupational hazard of being one of the top athletes of your discipline.

Piastri serves his time at the side of the circuit after his lap one Baku crash

Photo by: Rudy Carezzevoli / Getty Images

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella pointed towards his former life at Ferrari as an example, citing that Michael Schumacher was occasionally capable of producing the odd off-day. Indeed, there are incidents to look back on here: his 2003 Brazilian GP off in admittedly poor weather conditions, a lock-up in the Monaco tunnel in 2004, which caught Juan Pablo Montoya off-guard and led to their crash together, and myriad examples of perhaps less-than-exemplary behaviour throughout 1994, before he'd even joined Ferrari.

Indeed, McLaren has been through its own moments in which its title charger threw away a weekend: more dramatically, perhaps, but hyperbole tends to be rewarded in this modern world of YouTube thumbnails and search engine optimisation. Ayrton Senna, for example, had his own howler in Monaco's 1988 race when he dumped his MP4/4 into the wall at Portier while running in a very comfortable lead.

[The Baku crash] doesn't make Piastri any less of a driver to endure those moments - it's just an occupational hazard of being one of the top athletes in your discipline

This came just one day after a mesmerising qualifying lap, one still lauded for Senna's continued efforts - bearing race tyres, rather than one-lap qualifying specials - to shave chunks out his times. With one hand off the wheel to shift gears through most of the lap (as was the style at the time), Senna dug out a lap 1.4s quicker than rival Alain Prost, hurling his car on pole for Sunday's race.

"I was well over something conscious," he later remarked, while recounting the lap. But letting the sub-conscious take over in a race, while often rewarding, can often diverge into a loss of focus.

On that day, Senna's lead continued to build and build with every passing lap of the Monaco circuit, gathering over a second per lap in the opening stages over his team-mate, driving on pure instinct and muscle memory to slice through the chicanes, the claustrophobic corners and the traffic proliferating the streets at rush hour...

...until it was over on lap 67. Senna hit the wall on the entrance to the tunnel, bringing him back to planet Earth with a shattering halt. The crash was never broadcast at the time, only the aftermath, and Senna trudged back to his apartment rather than face the music in his team's garage.

Senna dazzled in Monaco - and then a lapse in focus led to his inexplicable retirement

Photo by: Sutton Images

McLaren also had to endure Mika Hakkinen's pair of shunts at Formula 1's two Italian venues in 1999. The first, in the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola, arrived when Hakkinen was coming up to complete the 17th lap with 12 seconds in hand over team-mate David Coulthard.

Rattling over the erstwhile final chicane at the Imola circuit, the Finn took too much kerb, hit the throttle too eagerly on the exit and lost the rear. His subsequent flop into the wall snuffed out the chance of a second consecutive win.

His Italian Grand Prix moment later that year, however, was arguably more of a heart-breaker. Hakkinen had started the 30th lap with an eight-second lead over Heinz-Harald Frentzen, and was taking his usual position for the double-chicane that used to open the lap at the Monza circuit.

But he'd again lost the rear through the opening phase of the corner, couldn't control the car through the right-hand switchback, and spun into the grass and gravel lining the circuit. There was no attempt to bring the car around again; he knew in the moment that the rear wheels were beached.

What happened next, of course, is famous. Hakkinen bolted out of the car, shrugged off the marshals, threw his gloves to the floor in anguish, and then was spotted shedding a tear within the bushes. In that moment, the TV feed did not want to offer a moment of privacy.

Hakkinen later recalled that he'd dropped down to first gear instead of second, which locked the rears and forced his ignominious slide off the circuit. Having felt that adding more lock in the differential had given him too much understeer, he kept the throttle part-way open while braking for the corner – and that extra flick on his gear shifter had just been too much for the car to contain.

"He's out of the race, he's out of the race!" Murray Walker's commentary is inextricably linked to Hakkinen's Monza retirement in 1999

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Piastri, of course, had not even got that far in Baku – his race was over after just four corners and, unlike Hakkinen and Senna, he was nowhere near the lead at the time. But boil them down to their constituent elements, and it leaves driver error as the root cause. Even those feted as the greatest have their mental slips behind the wheel.

In both cases, Senna and Hakkinen lost the win but gained a championship at the end of the season. While McLaren has endured other moments where drivers made crucial errors and later lost their grip on the title – Lewis Hamilton's pit-entry off in China 2007 being one such case – Piastri's crash feels like a much less weighty loss. It was a bad day that got worse, rather than a good day that descended into a momentary nadir.

He'll take that, and he'll move on. Oscar Piastri always does.

Piastri mustn't dwell too much on his Baku retirement - and he won't

Photo by: Jayce Illman / Getty Images