Oscar Piastri suffered more misery in his home city as he suffered more misfortune on the streets of Melbourne. One year on from spinning while fighting for the lead of the Australian Grand Prix, before settling for just ninth place, things got even worse for the crowd favourite as this time he crashed out before the race Down Under even began.

It happened on one of the reconnaissance laps, just moments after Piastri had left the McLaren garage. There was still more than half an hour to go until the start of the first race of the new Formula 1 season when his car spun around while he tried to accelerate around a corner.

Piastri ran over a kerb on the outside which seemed to immediately unsettle the rear of his McLaren before it spun around on him. It then slammed hard into the inside wall, sending it skidding back across the circuit to come to a rest on the grass. When his destroyed car stopped moving, the 24-year-old was left sitting in the cockpit with his head in his hands.

He was unhurt, reporting that fact over the radio before climbing out of the remains of his car unaided. Piastri then trudged back to the pit lane with his helmet still on, though his body language was clear – it was another gut-wrenching moment for a Melburnian man desperate to make some positive memories on home soil.

McLaren chief executive Zak Brown was on hand to give his immediate reaction and said: “We’ve not seen anything on the data so far and he didn’t say anything on the radio, so we’ll do a post-mortem after the race and see what happened.

“For now we’ve got to focus on the car we have in the race and get the excitement level back up because that is definitely disappointing for Oscar in his home race. I’m sure he’ll be sore about that one for a while, but these race car drivers know how to recover quickly, so definitely not the way you want to get started – but we’ll be back.”

Piastri was not the only one who failed to make it to his grid slot. Nico Hulkenberg stopped his Audi on track while entering the last corner at the end of his reconnaissance laps. His mechanics wheeled him to his grid slot but he was eventually taken off the track and into the pit lane so they could work on a problem in the hope of getting him in a position to start.

But when the lights went out his Audi was nowhere to be seen. Having been due to start 11th, the German was left stuck in the pit lane and the Australian GP had lost two of its runners before even getting under way.