For the 22-year-old McLaren driver,back at home this weekend for the third round of the Formula 1 season at Albert Park,2024 is the first time in five years that the Melburnian has enjoyed a repeat season in the same motorsport series. It’s a small detail with potentially big rewards.
Australian Formula 1 star Oscar Piastri (left) and seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton.Artwork:Stephen Kiprillis
Familiarity could further unlock the potential that saw Piastri win the Formula 3 and on the way to world motorsport’s elite category,and in a sport where half a tenth of a second can be the difference between glory or anonymity,simply knowing what’s coming could be a game-changer.
Piastri was up against it in 2023. Some of that adversity was circumstantial,with 11 of the 22 circuits on the season schedule – Albert Park among them – tracks he’d never turned a wheel on before.
What’s more,he was race rusty;with Formula 2 rules preventing a driver who wins the title from racing in the category again,,meaning he went 450 days without competition from the 2021 F2 finale in Abu Dhabi to the 2023 F1 opener in Bahrain.
More pertinently,there was the distance and duration of a grand prix;305-kilometre races that take around 90 minutes were a step up from F2 races,which are 170km affairs lasting less than an hour. That extra duration exposed a void in Piastri’s knowledge bank that was one of the few times he actually looked like a rookie,but one explained by his meteoric rise to the top flight.
Piastri moved through the junior formulae so rapidly – he was Formula Renault Eurocup champion in 2019,Formula 3 champion in 2020 and the F2 winner in 2021 – that this year’s F1 campaign is the first time he’s had the benefit of a sophomore season in the same category since he was 18 years old. Speed can mitigate the downsides of a lack of experience,but only so much.
Last year,understanding how to piece together a race and extract every drop of performance out of F1’s Pirelli tyres was a dark art Piastri only partially came to grips with,and a box he knows needs ticking.
“There were some races last year that were strong,but I think there was definitely somewhere I struggled more and a lot of those sort of had similar characteristics,” he said in Bahrain ahead of the season start.
“There’s certainly some tyre management that I want to focus on. The only time you can really learn it is during the race,so it’s a very difficult thing to learn.
“I feel like throughout the season,you get a lot of opportunities in practices to focus on performance running and qualifying-style preparation,just because of the time that’s available. I think it’s a bit of an element of experience,but I’m trying to fast-track that as much as I can.”
Tiptoeing the fine line between extracting performance from F1’s bespoke tyres while preserving their longevity is a delicate balance that can trip up even the most experienced drivers,let alone ones as green as Piastri was last year.
Push a tyre too hard too early,and you’ll be hanging on with fading rubber that’s overheating thermally or shedding tread before your next pit stop or the chequered flag. Baby the tyres too much,and you risk them falling out of their ideal temperature window to provide the necessary grip to hustle a car through the corners.
Factor in variances in asphalt temperatures and abrasiveness,the effect racing nose-to-tail in traffic has on how hot your tyres run,the changing weight of the machines as they burn fuel through the race and tripwires to avoid like heavily serrated kerbs and debris,and there’s a lot to digest,let alone when you’re racing on tracks you don’t know and in races longer than anything you’ve ever tackled. The smallest slips in performance,at this level,get heavily punished.
Piastri learned fast last year,and as McLaren’s MCL60 car recovered from a troubled birth to emerge as the primary threat to Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing late in the season,the rookie reached new heights.
at one of the sport’s most daunting tracks,but the joy of a maiden podium 24 hours later for third was tempered by McLaren teammate Lando Norris finishing 17 seconds ahead of him in second place,Piastri’s tyre management L-plates limiting his progress.
Better was to come next time out in Qatar,another track he’d never driven on;,while in the 57-lap grand prix,he finished second,just 4.8 seconds adrift of Verstappen.
That Doha result remains the best of Piastri’s 24-race F1 career to date,and the high point of.
“I feel like my rookie season was pretty solid,” Piastri told the Australian Grand Prix’s official program,“but there’s definitely a few things to work on.
“I’m not using that rookie season and the statistic of how successful it was in points to take away from anything that still needs improving.
“I think in every category it’s a bit easier to look like a successful rookie than to be a successful second or third or fourth-year driver. You’ve got a bit of added grace in your rookie season.”
Now,though,the stakes have been raised. While Verstappen comes to Melbourne off back-to-back wins this season,Ferrari has assumed best-of-the-rest status over the chasing pack,Carlos Sainz (Bahrain) and Charles Leclerc (Saudi Arabia) rounding out the podium in the first two races of the year behind Verstappen and teammate Sergio Perez.
Oscar Piastri in action during practice at Albert Park on Friday.Eddie Jim
Piastri and Norris,using McLaren’s MCL38 car to qualify inside the top eight at both races so far,have the British team sitting third in the constructors’ standings,ahead of Mercedes,after Piastri finished fourth a fortnight ago in Jeddah.
The prospects of Piastri going one better and securing a podium finish over 58 laps on Sunday in Melbourne,a pipedream this time last year,is at least improbable rather than impossible,he feels.
“Being realistic … being in the fight for the third-quickest team is probably where we’re at at the moment,” he said in the Albert Park pre-race press conference.
“I think we were a step closer to being close to Ferrari,at least anyway in Saudi,but … we don’t quite have enough at the moment. Probably the fight is with Mercedes at the moment for us. I think any more than P5 is going to require some good fortune.
“I don’t want to put people’s hopes down at home,but hopefully,we can start challenging a bit more later in the year.”
As the third race in a 24-race campaign that’s the longest in F1 history,another top-five showing for Piastri would be something to build on as he settles into his second season,one where the gradient of his learning curve won’t – for once – be vertical.
Piastri,Norris chase past glories for McLaren
Only Ferrari (243 victories) has won more Formula 1 grands prix than McLaren (183),and the British team’s honour roll of world champions – Alain Prost,Ayrton Senna and Lewis Hamilton among them – reads like a who’s who of the sport.
McLaren teammates Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri.AP
While the past 12 years have been mostly painful for the former powerhouse – Daniel Ricciardo’s win at the 2021 Italian Grand Prix is McLaren’s only grand prix victory since 2012 – team principal Andrea Stella is confident that it has the driver pairing to flip that script with Piastri and Norris together for a second campaign in 2024.
Norris,signed by McLaren as a teenager,has spent all six of his seasons driving for the team,while Piastri’s management,headed by former Australian F1 driver Mark Webber,extracted him from a reserve driver role at Alpine when McLaren cut an underperforming Ricciardo in 2022.
Stella,the 53-year-old Italian engineer who worked with world champions Michael Schumacher,Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso at Ferrari,has no doubt he has a combination that can push one another to send the team on a fast track back to the top,with Piastri’s rapid development in his rookie season opening his eyes.
“Once we started working with him … we understood why he was so successful in the junior categories,winning championships three times in a row at the first attempt – that’s remarkable,” Stella told the official F1 podcastBeyond The Grid at the end of 2023.
“This category of drivers – you put them in a car,you put them in the simulator and they just immediately show their natural speed. For Oscar,high-speed corners … is his most natural ground. He seems to be in his comfort zone in these high-speed corners.
“What impressed us is his awareness,the awareness of what the opportunities are even before he looks at any telemetry. He has this capacity to self-recognise where there’s more to come from either himself or the car. This is not so obvious … I know drivers that can be fast,but they need external support to see what is possible from themselves or the car. Oscar has this characteristic very developed in terms of being a good judge of these opportunities.”
While teammate Norris waits for his big breakthrough – he has 13 F1 podiums without a win,sharing an unwanted record for most top-three results without victory with early 2000s journeyman Nick Heidfeld – Stella says the 24-year-old’s pace places the onus squarely on McLaren to step up.
“Natural speed – I think Lando can compete with some of these big names like Schumacher or Alonso,” he said.
“The real success factor is making your race craft bigger,creating as much as possible adaptability because you’re never going to have the perfect car,perfect situation. Lando is on a very strong path from this point of view. As soon as we gave him a car that was able to compete for podiums,he just achieved it.
“It’s more on us now to give him the machinery to capitalise on his qualities.“
How Piastri learnt to embrace being the hometown hero
Piastri says he is a much more relaxed figure ahead of his second home-town grand prix than he was before dodging the carnage of last year’s race for a top-10 finish,and admits it took time to adjust to the celebrity status that comes with being a Formula 1 driver.
Piastri,the 22-year-old rising star of the sport who grew up in bayside Melbourne,said it would take a stroke of luck to beat the dominant Red Bulls on Sunday but thinks he is better prepared to cope with the on and off-track pressures of his home race.
He has the surreal experience of being the voice of the Melbourne’s trams taking people to the event. His name and face are plastered all over McLaren headquarters inside the Albert Park grand prix precinct,and he’s just finished meeting and greeting hundreds of screaming fans around the track.
Oscar Piastri poses for a selfie with a fan.Eddie Jim
Piastri initially found the stardom surreal but described the parade lap before last year’s race as “one of the coolest moments of my life.
“Seeing all the McLaren supporters,all the people supporting me – even if they weren’t in McLaren gear – supporting the home driver was very special,” he said.
“It’s amazing getting that sort of support,but it’s not really something people can teach you.”
Piastri admits he doesn’t have a lot of local knowledge because he left Australia to chase his motorsport dream when he was a young teenager.
“I left here when I was fourteen 14,I actually don’t know Melbourne that well,” he said in an exclusive interview with this masthead on Thursday ahead of his second grand prix at Albert Park.
“I kind of know what Google can tell you,and not much more. I do get asked quite a lot,but leaving home so early I’m just as much as a tourist as some of the others.”
Piastri felt the pressure to prove himself before last year’s race as the only Australian on the grid,but the always-smiling has since returned to the top level with RB,Red Bull’s feeder team. Melbourne proved a turning point for Piastri,who was rookie of the year in 2023 and is fighting for podium spots after finishing 8th in Bahrain and 4th in Saudi Arabia.
After one of the sport’ss ever at the Albert Park circuit last year,he emerged with the first championship points of his F1 career.
“I feel much more relaxed from that point of view. I’ve sort of established myself in the sport much more... Of course the expectation is still there,the home crowd I’m sure will want me to do well,” said Piastri,who is fifth in the driver standings.
“Quite a lot of things have changed,to be honest. Last year I came into this race,first home race,I didn’t have any points in F1 at that point. We had a tough start to the year.”
While Piastri might feel like a tourist in his own city,he does have a distinctive Melbourne quality. The 22-year-old is a Richmond Tigers diehard. Sporting the yellow and black jersey while greeting fans and media on Thursday,he tried to see if there were any games on during his time off in town.
“I don’t think the timing is great for the games. It’s kind of the only time of the year I can actually watch the footy properly because the time zone in Europe it’s impossible.”
Asked about his hopes of beating the Red Bulls,Piastri said:“It’s going to be very tough. They are looking incredibly strong,they have been for the last couple of years.
“I don’t think we’ll be beating them this year without some good fortune but we will certainly try.
“We’re close. I think the whole field is probably as close as they’ve ever been,just Red Bull are doing a very good job,and we need to try and catch up.”
Freelance journalist Matthew Clayton has been covering F1 for 25 years for several outlets,including redbull.com.
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