On Wednesday, McLaren announced it had signed a new ‘multi-year’ contract with Piastri in a deal thought to lock him away until the end of the decade.
It came despite the Australian having more than a year to run on his existing deal, and with a rumoured significant pay hike.
Where he was previously thought to be earning AUD $9.5 million (surging to AUD $35.6 million with bonuses last year), a report in the Mail has suggested he’s now pulling down more than AUD $40 million per annum.
“They’re both very well looked after, and we’ll leave it at that,” said McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown when asked if his two drivers were now on par in terms of salary.
Brown was integral in recruiting Piastri to McLaren, jumping at the opportunity when it was presented to him by Mark Webber.
It was a move that cost McLaren dearly, as Speedcafe revealed in August 2022, paying Daniel Ricciardo out of the final year of his contract to make way for the young Melburnian.
That show of faith did not go unnoticed and has generated a fierce loyalty.
“I was already signed up for this year and the next, but it felt like just a very natural progression to sign for an even longer term,” said the understated Aussie.
“Obviously, last year was an incredible year for the team.
“My two years at the team have been pretty incredible—starting from where we were when I joined to being constructors’ champions now.
“It made a lot of sense in my mind to try and continue that and build with the team.”
Locking Piastri down was, in many respects, the final piece of a broader puzzle Brown and McLaren team principal Andrea Stella have been working on.
With both drivers and senior management on long-term deals, it affords the team stability, a valuable asset for a team that has just completed a significant rebuilding effort.
“Having Lando and Oscar on board is one of the fundamental conditions to be competitive, and it has already paid off immensely,” Stella said.
It wasn’t only Piastri’s on-track contribution that encouraged Stella and Brown to offer the lucrative new contract.
Where disharmony has threatened to derail other teams, there are no such qualms at McLaren with both drivers working well, despite occasionally having conflicting individual goals.
“Oscar is also a perfect fit from a cultural, behavioural point of view,” Stella reasoned.
“Our role and my role is to bring stability, visibility, longevity to our drivers, to our leadership, to our team, to our pit wall, to our sponsorship, to our HPP [Mercedes power unit] partnership,” added Brown.
“If you look at the great sports teams, usually stability and camaraderie is a key ingredient to the long-term success and continued success.”
There’s another element to the deal as well.
While McLaren is looking to create stability in order to continue its current championship-winning form and take another step forward, it has also sent a signal to rival teams.
Contracts in Formula 1 are notoriously fickle, as Piastri’s arrival at Woking perfectly demonstrated, but his new deal sends a clear signal to rivals: hands off.
There was no urgent need to ink a new deal now; Brown and Stella could have waited a few weeks and taken time to assess Piastri’s continued progress.
Two wins in 2024 were a strong sign of growth, but he’s still far from the finished article and, by his own admission, there’s still more to come.
“For somebody who’s been in Formula 1 for two seasons, the level at which he has driven, the level of maturity he has shown inside and outside of the car, has been no shorter than simply impressive,” said Stella.
“We are world champions because he delivered.
“Because winning the constructors world championship is just the sum of the points of the two drivers.
“The trajectory we have observed in Oscar’s growth was very convincing, and at no point we saw that this trajectory had any sort of deviation from being very steep.”
Brown shares Stella’s conviction in Piastri and therefore so no reason to dally.
“There wasn’t pressure from either side,” he said.
“We know we want to have stability and visibility moving forward, that puts everyone in a great frame of mind.
“Obviously people perform at their optimum levels of performance when they’re not distracted, and we know in this sport there’s an element of teams trying to distract.
“We just wanted to get well ahead, and we know exactly what we wanted to do.”
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