Oscar Piastri says orders given by McLaren at the Italian Grand Prix contributed to what he describes as his "worst weekend in racing" in Baku.

The Australian driver crashed out in qualifying for September's Azerbaijan Grand Prix and then in the race, with that kickstarting a real downturn for the season.

Piastri crashed out on the first lap on a weekend in which his lead at the top of the drivers' standings started to diminish.

That horror show came two weeks after Piastri was told to let team-mate Norris regain second place after a pitstop mix-up at Monza.

After initial complaints, Piastri accepted that call but has now admitted it affected him heading into Baku on a season-shifting weekend.

"Obviously, the race before [Baku] 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," he 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 that weekend, which are notoriously tricky to handle. There were just a lot of little things that eventually kind of added up."

The fight for second is still anyone's guess!

There are still 144 points up for grabs in the Constructors' Championship... who comes out on top? #F1 #BrazilGP pic.twitter.com/30omPXD40F

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Piastri has since slipped 24 points behind Norris with three rounds to go, with last week's Brazilian Grand Prix his third successive fifth-place finish, having finished fourth in Singapore the race after the Baku meltdown.

"Ultimately, Baku was the perfect storm of quite a few things," Piastri added.

"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."