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McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has detailed the characteristics possessed by Oscar Piastri to fulfill a claim made by CEO Zak Brown earlier in the season.
After just three grands prix of Piastri’s rookie year, and in the build-up to the street race in Azerbaijan at the end of April, Brown remarked that “the indications are we’ve got a future world champion on our hands”.
“Oscar has been impressive since we’ve had him in the car,” he added at the time. “He’s very mature, very focused, very technical.”
Although Piastri’s talent has been obvious after winning the Formula Renault Eurocup, F3 and F2 titles in successive seasons from 2019-2021, it was a bold statement for Brown to make after only 121 laps of racing under Piastri’s belt.
The 22-year-old Melburnian has continued to progress, notably since upgrades were added to the MCL60, although blotted his copybook slightly with a crash last Friday in practice for the Dutch Grand Prix.
Nevertheless, with the season now past the halfway stage, and at a point in time when Piastri could be better judged, Speedcafe asked Brown to quantify his statement from earlier in the campaign.
With Stella sitting alongside him, Brown opted to defer to the Italian, who added flesh to the bones of his boss’ comments from four months ago.
‘First of all, you see the speed,” Stella said. “Drivers who have the potential to become world championship material need to have a natural speed, which we saw straightaway.
“Then they need to have the head – the capacity, the capability to use their talent, which Oscar establishes in an interesting way.
“He keeps his head very clean of noise, and disturbances. He has a strong attitude to learning because he doesn’t distract himself.
“We saw this straightaway, in testing, but also in the early races of the season, and then it became more apparent as the car became competitive that he can compete at the top of Formula 1.
“So it’s a natural talent, a capability to learn, and then he’s a good person, with a set of values, ethics, ethos.
“It is these three elements that are part of the race craft, that world champion craft, that we can see in Oscar.”
After finishing fourth in the British GP, fifth in the following race in Hungary, and then qualifying and finishing second in the sprint event ahead of the Belgian GP, since then Piastri has endured a tricky spell.
He was involved in a first-corner collision with Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz in the main race at Spa-Francorchamps, and then after the practice crash at Zandvoort which cost him valuable track time, he only qualified eighth to team-mate Lando Norris’ second.
The wet-dry-wet race proved to be a lottery for all concerned, from which Piastri emerged with a ninth-place finish.
For this weekend’s Italian Grand Prix, with dry conditions expected, for Piastri and Norris to deliver a strong result, the car will need to be a radical improvement from the one seen at Spa, with car set-up similar across the two circuits.
In mixed conditions in Belgium, McLaren was exemplary but on a dry track, the car was found wanting for pace and performance.
Outlining what can be expected this weekend, Stella added: “In terms of Monza, we are making some adjustments.
“As we said after Spa, we urgently needed to activate some actions to find some top speed because Monza is going to set some challenges similar to what we had in Spa.
“So there will be some modifications which will hopefully allow us to not only be quick in terms of lap time but also be raceable in terms of top speed.”
