“Piastri has convinced McLaren about his ultimate potential
FORMULA 1
McLaren’s announcement at Suzuka that it had extended Oscar Piastri’s contract to the end of 2026 was no great surprise given the 22-year-old’s enormously promising rookie season. He has been a much closer match to the team’s established star Lando Norris than Daniel Ricciardo had managed in the previous two years. On occasion, such as at Spa, he has even out-performed him. But it’s the manner in which he has conducted himself which has convinced McLaren, specifically its team principal Andrea Stella, about his ultimate potential.
It’s not just Piastri’s natural speed, but the way in which he fits with the culture Stella is engendering, which is key. What does that mean? To get that requires an understanding of Stella himself. He made his name at Ferrari as a performance engineer for Michael Schumacher and Kimi Raikkonen before becoming Fernando Alonso’s race engineer there. He followed Alonso to McLaren where he took on a more senior engineering role in which he deployed a calm, creative intelligence made all the more effective by a quietly warm and friendly personality. He has fantastic people skills and has been a key part in changing what was sometimes a cold and paranoid environment into a much warmer, more open place. Zak Brown has understood this and given him ever-greater responsibility until he now effectively runs the shop, leaving Brown to attend to business.
So for Stella, getting the best from any of the hundreds of talented people in a race team and aligning them all in the same direction despite their natural personal competitiveness, is about understanding their strengths and giving them the environment in which they can be nurtured and deployed to maximum effect. It’s a process of growth. A driver, as a touchpoint of the organisation, someone from whom many take their inspiration, has an important role to play in addition to his skills in the car. Stella sees Piastri as the embodiment of what he wants McLaren to be.
“Formula 1 is a highly professional business, highly competitive, but it is run by humans and executed by humans,” he says. “The foundations for how you generate the positive feelings, the positive state of mind in which people offer their best, they have to do with humans. So showing confidence, proving the trust, proving the belief: they are fundamentals and we want to leverage performance on these fundamentals… We wanted to show very early that we don’t need any convincing about Oscar
