Piastri's engineer on the key qualities of his driver

      Oscar Piastri has been competing in Formula 1 since 2023, and from the Australian driver's debut with McLaren he has worked with race engineer Tom Stallard.

      Over the past two and a half seasons they have gone from the first not-very-successful races to the first podiums, which didn’t take long to arrive, to the first wins and to leading the championship. Ahead of the Dutch Grand Prix, in an interview with The Race, Stallard talked about what has driven the Australian driver's such impressive progress.

      "When a driver starts to make progress and win, it can sometimes seem as if it was almost predestined, and we say, 'Well, of course, he should be performing like this,'" Stallard reflected. "But behind the scenes there is the work that actually predetermined those successes. Success only becomes an inevitable consequence on the condition that all the work that leads to it is done well.

      Moreover, the sense of inevitability is underlined by the fact that Oscar races in a very calm manner. That’s also a very positive quality, but it is achieved only through the hard work that underpins it."

      If Piastri becomes world champion this year, it will be one of the quickest rises in Formula 1 history, and the shortest route to a first title since 2008, when Lewis Hamilton won the championship in his second season.

      One of the obvious differences between the two McLaren drivers is that Lando Norris’s results quite noticeably depend on how comfortable he is behind the wheel, whereas Piastri performs more consistently. It seems he has managed to find the right balance between striving to optimize the car and recognizing that its capabilities are, after all, limited, which requires a particular approach.

      "I think that’s really the case," Stallard confirms. "It’s not easy, because in junior series a driver can change little about the car. But when he gets to F1, you can literally change any setting. And Oscar is excellent at adapting the demands he places on the car. He has always been very adaptable. Already in his first season at McLaren it became clear that as soon as he understands exactly what needs to be achieved, he usually achieves it.

      That partly explains why in his very first year we had such a positive view of him, even if his results didn’t always allow us to foresee that he would be leading the championship in the first half of the 2025 season."