How Piastri went from Alpine question mark to McLaren race winner

Formula 1 sophomore sensation Oscar Piastri looks like the real deal: the McLaren driver’s standout Azerbaijan Grand Prix victory had all the hallmarks of a future world champion.

Piastri’s first F1 win at the Hungarian Grand Prix felt muddied slightly by the clumsy and prolonged back-and-forth between McLaren and teammate Lando Norris about the latter moving over to give the Australian the lead; the team had inadvertently swapped the pair around through their strategy calls. There was nothing to overshadow his second. It was a breakthrough performance that will be difficult to replicate in a hurry.

He’s been on a remarkable journey to this point. Little more than two years ago, Piastri’s future could not have been less clear.

In August 2022, Alpine put out a news release stating that the boy wonder who had won Formula 3 and Formula 2 in the previous seasons would be racing for them the following season. On the surface, there was nothing unusual about that; Piastri had been a member of the Alpine driver academy and felt like the future face of their F1 programme.

His iconic reply changed the course of F1 history.

I understand that, without my agreement, Alpine F1 have put out a press release late this afternoon that I am driving for them next year. This is wrong and I have not signed a contract with Alpine for 2023. I will not be driving for Alpine next year.

— Oscar Piastri (@OscarPiastri) August 2, 2022

Piastri had been in contact with McLaren CEO Zak Brown about replacing Daniel Ricciardo. The door had been left open by Alpine’s dithering over his future. The French team had backed themselves into a corner by signing Esteban Ocon to a longer deal, and then struggled to decide on whether to stick with Fernando Alonso or twist with Piastri, and in the end saw both drivers walk to rival teams.

McLaren eventually got Piastri after a court hearing. It was rough early on; McLaren’s 2023 season started so poorly that the team sacked technical director James Key. Eighteen months later, it is leading the constructors’ championship and might well have a sniff at the drivers’ title with Norris. Piastri never imagined it would turn around so spectacularly.

“Even in those 18 months, the benefit of making that decision has gone through a hell of a rollercoaster,” he said to ESPN in Monza of his move from Alpine to McLaren. “For me, regardless of results, there was a lot of things on both sides of that story that led to me joining McLaren. I more or less knew or had the expectation McLaren would be a midfield team. To then go towards a tail-end team in the first part of last year to potentially a championship-winning team now, I couldn’t have predicted it in my wildest dreams.

“Of course you want to be in the best team you can and have a chance of winning races and championships, but at that time it wasn’t about that, firstly it was just about getting into F1 and being at a team that wanted me and supported me. And to be honest, the success that we’ve had so early on has been a massive bonus. It’s turned out to be a hell of a lot better than anyone expected, but it would have been a good decision no matter where it went.”

Brown’s swoop for Piastri will likely go down as one of the best in F1’s recent history. His drivers now both have two career victories apiece.

While having two drivers of championship calibre is a good problem to have, the headaches for McLaren have mounted in recent weeks. The team’s “Papaya rules” made headlines at the Italian Grand Prix, where Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc snatched a win from under their noses, and the build-up to the Baku race was the team’s decision to prioritise Norris when the situation called for it. Ironically, Norris played a key role in Piastri’s victory on Sunday by holding up Red Bull’s Sergio Pérez at a crucial moment in the pit-stop phase. The team’s reward was the lead in the constructors’ championship for the first time since 2014.

A logical question follows now that Piastri has levelled Norris’ win tally again. Who is McLaren’s best driver?

On paper, Norris has the edge. Remarkably, he leads the qualifying head-to-head 14-3 and has a 32-point buffer over his teammate. While Norris has let some big victory opportunities slip through his fingers, it is his consistent ability to get the best out of the car that has put him in the position he’s in as closest challenger to championship leader Max Verstappen.

A case could also be made for Piastri. Some sources in the team have suggested to ESPN that the Australian’s performance ceiling might be higher, while others have said he feels and responds to pressure differently to Norris. Team boss Andrea Stella called him the future of the team after the Italian Grand Prix, although that was less a dig at Norris and more an indication of why he felt Piastri would listen to team orders going forward from that point. Regardless of the context, it was a telling statement for Stella to have made.

For Piastri, he has seen one clear difference between himself and his teammate since the beginning.

“I think for me it’s still been a bit of a case of consistency,” Piastri said. “I think that is one of Lando’s strengths, he’s always very quick and always very on it. This year there’s been much less weekends where I’ve left going, ‘Yeah, that was pretty average,’ but there has still been a few. And when you’re fighting at the front for so many points, it can have a big impact on your result and your points. I think it’s a case of being consistently at my peak.

“I feel like my good weekends this year have been very good — still things to improve but I think everyone still has things to improve — it’s just the weekends that haven’t quite been there is where the difference has been made, really. I know that from my junior championships. The saying that ‘The bad days are where the championships are won’ is extremely true.”

Piastri’s latest run of form suggests he might be discovering the answer to his consistency problem. Since winning in Hungary, he’s only finished behind Norris once, when the Brit won the Dutch Grand Prix. In two races he’s pulled off two stunning overtakes: one on Norris in Monza, when he caught his teammate napping and stole the lead around the outside of the Roggia chicane, and then again in Baku, when he dived down the inside of Leclerc at Turn 1. Both races have shown a ruthless streak usually reserved for the sport’s greatest champions.

Piastri later admitted he had ignored the advice of race engineer Tom Stallard, who had asked him to look after the tyres and then later attempt to pass Leclerc, in Baku. It perhaps showed a race style Piastri still remembers from his time in the feeder categories.

“Until you get to F1, there’s not really any races with strategy; it’s basically just drive as fast as you can from start to finish,” Piastri said. “In F1, there’s some races like that, which were generally the races I did better at last year, but there’s a lot that aren’t, where you need to look after the tyres — is it a one-stop versus a two-stop, sometimes maybe even a three.

“So there’s a lot of new experiences last year with that. Until you actually experience it, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like and that’s where the naivety came in as a rookie. I fully expected some hard races but it maybe took me a little bit more time to get on top of than I expected.”

For now, this is all good news for McLaren. When one driver’s weekend was derailed by a bizarre situation in Q1, the other stepped up and won the race. One helped the other without complaint. The constructors’ championship appears to be theirs to lose, while the drivers’ championship looks there for the taking if Norris can string together some strong races in the coming weeks.

Beyond 2024, that situation becomes slightly less clear. Most would expect McLaren to have a quick, if not the quickest, car to start next season given where it is in the competitive order. Baku was proof that Piastri is ready to fight for a world championship, but the harmony the team has delicately managed to hold together this year might be tricky to keep in place in 2025 if Piastri and Norris are both as good as they’ve looked at different points this year.