Dubbed The Professor during his career, Prost recorded 51 wins from 199 starts and was famed for his calculated approach.
His style was calm, controlled, and ruthlessly efficient, starkly contrasting with the flamboyant aggression of Senna, whom he raced alongside at McLaren in 1988 and 1989.
Asked where on that spectrum of two extremes Piastri puts himself, the 22-year-old suggested he’s more akin to Prost.
“I would say much, much close to Prost in that side of things,” he told Speedcafe.
“I think with the amount of downforce we have on the cars these days, I think you have to drive them quite straight.
“And with the tyres we have as well, they just don’t like being sideways, so you have to always adapt to what you’ve got around you.
“For me, that’s how I tried to look at my driving style. I think I have a natural way of driving a car, let’s say, but I feel like one of my strengths is being able to adapt to different cars quite quickly.
“All the junior cars that I drove all had pretty different characteristics,” he added.
“When you look at some of those cars that I drove, the F2 car probably suited me quite nicely with some of the characteristics there.
“In F1, there’s certain characteristics that are nice and some that are not so nice, but you’ve got to be able to drive with all of them.”
Throughout his career, Prost had few major crashes while his ability to manage a race – and the tricky turbocharged engines of the mid-1980s – earned him his nickname.
While still very much in the early stages of his own F1 career, one can draw parallels with Piastri.
The Australian has developed a reputation for starting a weekend slowly and building into it, adopting a cautious approach and only pushing to the limit when absolutely necessary.
“An element of it was deliberate [in 2023], but not entirely,” he confessed of his trademark approach.
“I was gaining experience with the car; I was getting more and more comfortable with the car in different conditions.
“Qualifying is when you have the highest grip, the lowest fuel, you know, it’s kind of the best conditions you have and I think in some ways it can disguise some of the handling difficulties that you have.
“That was definitely an element, especially in the first part of the year, where I just felt much more comfortable in qualifying, somewhat ironically, because it’s so high pressure.
“But for me, that’s where I always felt the most comfortable with the car.
“As we got later into the year, that wasn’t as much of a trend, but I think the only thing that was also working against me in the second half of the year was so many new circuits.
“What I gained in understanding the car a bit better at different fuel loads and stuff, I then lost again because I was still learning and circuit.
“To end the year, Abu Dhabi, for example, I felt like I was on the pace; I was just making mistakes in my laps, so I was losing a lot of time in one corner, but the rest of the corners were all good.
“Certainly, the first half of the year, it was a little bit here, a little bit there, and before you know it, you add all that up, and it’s a decent deficit.”
The McLaren MCL38 Piastri is racing this year is an evolution of last year’s car.
The 2023 MCL60 had a difficult start to life, missing targets pre-season and needing an aggressive development effort from the team to transform it into a front-running machine.
And while there’s no doubt the MCL38 is a vastly superior package, many of the weaknesses of the MCL60 remain, including mid-corner understeer and a top speed deficit.
They’re issues the team is aware of and is working to resolve, but in the interim Piastri and team-mate Lando Norris are forced to drive around them.
“Generally, the high-speed stuff suits me well, more so than the slower stuff,” Piastri ventured of his own strengths.
“That doesn’t mean it’s just a blanket all the high-speed is good, all the low-speed is bad.
“There’s certainly some quick corners where I was struggling a bit last year and some slow corners where I was strong.
“So it’s not as simple as that, but I would say on average, the higher speed corners were where I came up last year.”
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