I went to Oscar Piastri’s 21st birthday party.
It was a gloriously sunny evening overlooking the golden beach of Brighton, south Melbourne, in April 2022. Formula One was back in Australia’s sporting capital for the first time post-pandemic; people were in the mood to celebrate.
Alpine, employing Piastri as a test and reserve driver and running a private testing program to build his experience before his F1 debut, wanted to keep the Brighton boy as sweet as possible. Although he wouldn’t race at home that year, it was essential to keep Piastri front of mind for the F1 press corps. (As if the double rookie champion in Formula 3 and Formula 2 in the two preceding years would be ignored.)
But we know from the fallout of Piastri’s subsequent contract dispute with Alpine after he had signed with McLaren that the Oxfordshire-based team had good reason to make what fuss it could.
Piastri and his camp, led by steely former F1 racer Mark Webber, were frustrated with Alpine’s slow progress towards his F1 graduation. An unexpected turn towards a 2023 race seat with Williams that Piastri didn’t want was the final straw that led to their efforts to seal a deal with McLaren.
A birthday party was the least Alpine could do for its emerging young star, who was already put out enough to consider jumping ship without ever leaving port. McLaren had yet to show just how mighty a team it would become, even after the false dawn of a win (in the 2021 Italian Grand Prix) the year before.
Between the bottled beers and canapés, however, there was little sign of the brewing tensions behind the scenes. Among Piastri’s friendly family, all appeared well. Webber’s speech was glowing, but unfussy. He and his charge were aware that they still had everything to prove on their stalled F1 journey.
Piastri did the rounds, charming and chilled. It’s not hard to be the most charismatic person in a room filled with F1 journalists, but the man of the hour didn’t seem fazed. Here, then, finally, is the lesson pertinent to the 2025 F1 world title fight.
Piastri leads the F1 drivers’ championship (Xinhua/Sipa USA)
Three years later, Piastri is a five-time grand prix winner, snaring another fine and often forgotten Qatar sprint win late in his debut F1 season, before McLaren started rolling towards its position as championship dominator. He has long since proved he’s worthy of a berth at the top level.
But that straightforwardness has remained a key part of his game. To watching fans, it’s his signature detached style.
He discussed in Jeddah last week how he had learned to avoid the “negative impact” of being overly emotional behind the wheel. But this has combined with his natural tendency for “being calm and trying to stay relaxed” in a car cockpit.
What’s different in 2025 is just how much Piastri has improved in two key areas where his McLaren teammate Lando Norris still held a clear edge in 2024: qualifying pace and in-race tire management.
Norris still retains a slight edge on pure speed, but his high-energy driving style makes his McLaren too edgy at key times, and mistakes follow too often. His Jeddah Q3 crash at the weekend was a further example.
Piastri, with his smoother style (he regularly takes single sweeps of the steering wheel compared to Norris’s multiple stabs), continues calmly onwards. He was really the second-fastest McLaren driver in Saudi Arabia, but that tranquillity paid him back handsomely. Piastri has closed the gap to Norris so well that McLaren has altered its previous strategy of prioritising its more experienced driver for new car parts. McLaren’s decision-makers know they must now provide the same equipment to two title contenders on either side of the orange garage.
Before the Jeddah weekend, the only thing missing from Piastri’s challenge — and the title credentials of all those hoping to usurp Max Verstappen as world champion this year — was definitive proof he can handle the white-hot sear of fighting the Red Bull driver in racing combat. Well, Piastri faced everything Norris encountered in his fights with Verstappen in 2024 and came out on top and unruffled. He just got his car stopped enough to stay within track limits as Verstappen was again deploying his art of turning defence into aggressive attack — this time while quickly earning a penalty.
But, really, the evidence of several 2024 battles was enough to know Piastri could rise to this most difficult of challenges.
In the 2024 Italian Grand Prix, Piastri ruthlessly passed Norris early on when he was fighting against the “number two driver” tag Webber had discovered can be so devastating at Red Bull against Sebastian Vettel. Norris was long established as McLaren’s only realistic title prospect by the Italian race last year.
Piastri, 24, has already won five grands prix in his young career (Mark Thompson/Getty Images)
For an example of Piastri’s great racecraft, look to the race that came right after Monza 2024. As awkwardness had followed his first F1 grand prix win in Hungary around Norris’s team orders saga, Piastri fully celebrated a brilliant follow-up win in Baku — the key to this triumph being a well-judged, last-gasp pass on longtime leader Charles Leclerc and then shrugging off an age of the Ferrari driver’s harrying to try and reclaim the lead.
In 2025, Norris is out to prove he “can be a world champion, but doing it by being a nice guy,” as he told the Guardian this month. This was an apparent reference to Verstappen’s willingness to do whatever it takes around F1’s complex and often confounding racing rules to gain an edge in battle.
F1 observers have seen the lengths to which Piastri will go to take on the championship’s most aggressive racer, but the sport had already got something of a preview when witnessing how he shut down Verstappen’s overly ambitious Turn 1 lunge in the 2024 Abu Dhabi season finale. His “move of a world champion, that one” response to their subsequent twin spins was so quietly withering it entered a long and celebrated list of Piastri’s cool team radio putdowns.
After he finished third in last year’s Qatar Grand Prix, his “oh dear, I’ve caused a scene” dry response to knocking over a drink with his microphone wire in the post-race press conference reinforced the belief that even among the distracting, lucrative trappings of the F1 bubble, Piastri is still delightfully himself. He is the same as he was that sunny April evening in Brighton three years ago.
He is popular across Australia because, even as a Monaco resident, he still follows cricket and regularly sports the jersey of his favorite Australian rules football team, Richmond.
Ice-cool and unfussy — that’s Oscar Piastri. He is already discovering the value of that composure when fighting for F1’s top prize. There is still a long way from anyone claiming that, but Piastri has already shown his class.
(Top photo: Sipa USA)