McLaren has hailed Aussie rookie Oscar Piastri as having all the makings of a Formula 1 world champion after just half a season in the sport.
Piastri is one of F1’s most highly anticipated rookies in years, having won three consecutive junior championships on his way to the top category, and was the subject of a high-profile stoush between McLaren and Alpine for his services this season after spending 2022 as a reserve driver.
Despite the team’s difficult start to the season with a badly underdeveloped car, Piastri was praised for his calm head and cool demeanour battling through the pack.
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He qualified inside the top 10 at just his second race, at the difficult Jeddah street circuit, and scored points one round later at his home grand prix in Melbourne, moving McLaren CEO Zak Brown to describe him as a “future world champion”.
His recent form has only reinforced that assessment, with the Melburnian shining since McLaren overhauled its car to propel itself into the frontrunning group.
Piastri would have finished on the podium in Silverstone were it not for a badly timed safety car, while damage undid his rostrum challenge at the following race in Hungary.
An extremely impressive performance in a soaking-wet Belgium delivered a sprint podium, but he was taken out of the grand prix by a first-corner crash with Carlos Sainz, ending early what had been a sterling weekend.
Team principal Andrea Stella, who engineered Michael Schumacher, Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso during his previous career at Ferrari, explained that Piastri is exhibiting all the key traits of a title-calibre driver.
“First of all you see the speed,” he said, per Speedcafe. “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 racecraft, that world champion craft, that we can see in Oscar.”
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Piastri’s return to action after the summer break at the Dutch Grand Prix delivered lukewarm results at a weekend of mixed conditions.
A crash in second practice left him down on dry-track experience at Zandvoort, which bit him hard during the top-10 shootout, when he couldn’t keep up with the improving track after an early shower and qualified eighth.
McLaren missed the opportunity to pit him when the rain arrived on the first lap of the race and instead chose to leave him out on slicks for the duration, a gutsy call that backed Piastri’s ability to keep his car on the road in treacherous conditions.
The strategy eventually swung back in his favour, catapulting him deep into the points, but a lockup in the dry forced him into a pit stop that reversed all his gains, leaving him ninth at the flag.
Teammate Norris fared only marginally better after stopping on lap 3, dropping him outside the top 10. The safety car for Logan Sargeant’s early crash helped him pass his way back up to seventh.
“Some important points, but the reality is we could have got more today as we missed a couple of opportunities,” Stella said.
“The good news is that the car was again quite competitive, so we will review where we could have improved and go again in Italy.”
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McLaren has been careful to play down expectations for this weekend’s Italian Grand Prix, where Monza’s long straights and top-speed priority will hurt the MCL60 excess drag.
Norris discovered the extent of those problems the hard way in Belgium, where he was defenceless down the straights in dry conditions on his way to seventh place.
The team trialled a new rear wing and beam wing during practice in Zandvoort that appeared to be aimed at improving aerodynamic efficiency, though it wasn’t used in the grand prix owing to the different aerodynamic demands of the slower Zandvoort track.
So far this season Piastri’s qualifying pace has put him on average 0.159 seconds behind Norris, equivalent to just under three places on the grid. Norris leads the qualifying head-to-head metric 13-3.
Their performances are much more evenly matched in race conditions, with Norris finishing ahead on average just 0.64 places at the flag and leading 9-5 head to head.
Norris leads Piastri 75-36 on the championship table in eighth and 12th places respectively.
McLaren is fifth in the constructors championship with 111 points.