Andrea Stella salutes Oscar Piastri’s “exceptional” season

Oscar Piastri had a full season as a rookie. The McLaren driver has gone through all the emotions and stages with McLaren. The season started off tricky, with a car far behind the teams at the top of the grid. After several challenging weekends, the Austrian Grand Prix was the revival of the team. The improvements made to Lando Norris’s car fueled hopes. The following weekend, once the new package was adapted to Oscar Piastri’s car, things started to improve.

The Australian driver and McLaren returned at high speed on their competitors. Notably, Oscar Piastri won a sprint victory in Qatar, just ahead of the untouchable Max Verstappen.

McLaren blown away by the level of Piastri

In terms of balance sheet, Oscar Piastri’s season is more than successful. If he is still far from his teammate in terms of points earned (97 against 205), the driver trained by the Alpine academy has obtained two podiums in addition to the sprint victory. For a first season, the Australian has made his mark on the team. For his team director, the most impressive performance of his driver is the one at the Grand Prix of Japan. « On a track like Suzuka, he started 2nd on the grid, let’s think for a second about the magnitude of this result », said Andrea Stella earnestly. « It’s a track not only high-speed, but also very narrow. It’s an unforgiving layout as soon as you go too wide because there is gravel at certain places. »

Andrea Stella also explains having been impressed by the attitude of the young driver. Despite his young age, Oscar Piastri remained clear-headed throughout the season and brought a lot of positivity to McLaren, quickly making Daniel Ricciardo forget. « He is very fast, he has the ability to learn very quickly », explains the Italian engineer. « He is very strong in collaboration with the engineers on the extraction of the information he needs to progress. He is also very clear on the different cases and knows how to be humble even on the tracks he does not know. He knows how to remain calm and control himself to maximize his potential. »

Andrea Stella satisfied with his driver

For his first year in Formula 1, Oscar Piastri had to race on circuits he was not familiar with. Formula 2 is contested on the same tracks as in Formula 1, however, Grand Prix like that of Singapore are not on the calendar of the antechamber. Andrea Stella noticed differences between the tracks familiar and unfamiliar to the Australian driver. « Oscar could do Free Practice and the full program being very competitive on circuits that were familiar to him », explained the director of McLaren. « But on tracks where he had never been before, [where] you only do a P1 and then you do a sprint, then you can see that the level you need to reach to be very competitive is very high. »

Andrea Stella also added « to be extremely satisfied with the level of performance that Oscar was able to achieve after having carried out quite a bit of training. »

Oscar Piastri finished his first season in Formula 1 in 9th place with 97 points in the driver’s championship.