Oscar Piastri has admitted that McLaren's team orders at the Italian Grand Prix were still on his mind when he suffered a disastrous crash-heavy weekend at the next round in Baku.
At Monza in September, then-championship leader Piastri was told to give second place back to teammate Lando Norris after gaining the position following a mix up in their pit stops. At the time, Piastri said the call was "fair" and that he and McLaren had "aligned" on the decision.
Two weeks later in Azerbaijan, Piastri crashed out in both qualifying and the race -- with the point-less weekend kickstarting a slump that has dropped him to 24 points behind Norris with three races remaining.
Now, Piastri has conceded that the Monza calls affected him.
"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 pitstops," Piastri told F1's Beyond the Grid podcast.
"But then also in 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.
"I think there was kind of some things in the lead-up, let's say, 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, and then I was driving not that well. We were on C6 tyres [Pirelli's new, softest compound] that weekend, which are notoriously tricky to handle. There were just a lot of little things that eventually kind of added up."
In Italy, Piastri was pitted first despite not being the lead car as McLaren feared about the threat of Charles Leclerc in fourth. A slow pit stop dropped Norris behind Piastri and the title-battling pair swapped places -- because of Piastri pitting first, not the error in the pits. Piastri has not won a race since.
Piastri said it all added up to his "worst weekend" in racing. "Ultimately, Baku was the perfect storm of quite a few things," he said.
"Obviously, it was a pretty terrible weekend, but I think the amount of learning we had from that weekend, from a technical point of view, emotional point of view ...
"There's no beating around the bush, that was the worst weekend I've ever had in racing, but probably the most useful in some ways. So, when you can start to look at things like that, normally that helps you out quite a lot.
"[If] you look at some of the names that have had some pretty shocking weekends, or almost unbelievable weekends or races or moments in their career where things have gone wrong; it happens to anyone.
"There's not one person in racing that doesn't have some kind of disastrous story of how a weekend went wrong for them. Looking at it from that perspective does help a lot, but you still need to learn the things you need to learn from weekends like that."