By Matthew Clayton
One, to end the statistical anomaly that no Australian driver has ever stood on the Albert Park podium, despite all three drivers from these shores since Melbourne’s maiden race in 1996 having multiple victories on their CVs.
And two? If McLaren really can translate its pre-season pace from testing into a championship tilt to stop Red Bull Racing’s Max Verstappen equalling Michael Schumacher’s all-time record of five consecutive drivers’ titles, Piastri – and teammate Lando Norris – can dream big.
Piastri greets fans at Albert Park this week.Credit: Formula 1 via Getty Images
It’s an internal fight Piastri feels he can win, but only if he picks off the low-hanging fruit of improvements he needs to make that became stark during his breakout two-win, eight-podium sophomore season.
“I do think that I can become world champion this year,” Piastri said.
“Twelve months ago, I was going into the season still with some weaknesses that I wasn’t particularly confident with … through last season I addressed them.
“It’s now just about addressing them every weekend, making sure that I’m putting my best foot forward every weekend. That’s what is going to be the difference.
Piastri arrives at a corporate function in a McLaren Artura painted by Melbourne artist Reko Rennie.Credit: Chris Hopkins
“I’m definitely not the finished product, but I don’t think anyone necessarily is.”
Piastri’s arrival at a team ready to win right now, so soon into his F1 career, is a chance that has to be grabbed with both hands. A glance at the F1 timelines of Hamilton and Alonso, the sport’s enduring 40-something stars, is instructive.
Teammates when Hamilton was a rookie at the same McLaren team in 2007, their careers have progressed in wildly divergent directions.
By 2007, Alonso was a two-time world champion (with Renault in 2005-06) before Hamilton’s pace, internecine squabbling and controversy saw him scurry back to Renault for 2009. From there, Alonso – 44 this July – engineered moves to put himself with the sport’s best teams, but never at times where they were the benchmark.
A five-year run with Ferrari from 2010-14 produced 11 grand prix wins and three championship runner-up finishes, but no third title. A 2015-18 move back to a McLaren team at its lowest ebb was so dire that he took a sabbatical before re-emerging with Renault in 2021, switching to Aston Martin from 2023 onwards.
Starting his record 20th Australian Grand Prix this weekend, Alonso hasn’t won a race since the 2013 Spanish Grand Prix, 201 races into a 401-race career.
Hamilton, on the other hand, walked away from a race-winning McLaren outfit in 2012 to move to Mercedes, right as the teams went in opposite directions.
McLaren took nine years (Ricciardo in Italy in 2021) to win another race after Hamilton departed, with Hamilton’s 2013-24 Mercedes stint by itself – six world titles, 84 victories – bettered only by Michael Schumacher’s entire career (seven titles, 91 wins) in the sport’s record books.
Ricciardo’s time at Red Bull (2014-18) coincided with team’s most fallow period since it first became world champions in 2010, the Austrian-owned, British-run squad winning eight titles either side of his tenure.
Webber, who didn’t get his hands on a race-winning car until a month shy of his 33rd birthday in 2009, had the misfortune of coming up against Sebastian Vettel, 11 years his junior and a home-grown product of Red Bull’s driver academy, in the sister garage for the team’s first peak from 2010-13.
It’s the experience of Webber – now Piastri’s manager – that’s most relevant to the 23-year-old against Norris, a McLaren protégé who has started all 128 of his grands prix with the British outfit.
Piastri, who exercised a clause in his contract to leave Alpine’s academy for McLaren when Ricciardo was jettisoned after 2022, has had to fight his corner to get on terms with Norris in a team moulded around the 25-year-old Briton, McLaren having Piastri play a supporting role to Norris’ longshot championship bid against Verstappen late last season.
The clumsily-named ‘papaya rules’ of engagement didn’t come without controversy – Piastri bullied his way past Norris at the start of the Italian Grand Prix before both were beaten by Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, while Piastri’s first win in Hungary came only after Norris had to be coerced to ceding the lead to Piastri, one he inherited during a pit stop for his teammate.
The duo played nice the longer the season went – Piastri handed Norris a sprint race win in Brazil when the championship flame flickered, and Norris repaid the favour in Qatar when it had been extinguished by Verstappen securing the title in Las Vegas – and while their partnership hasn’t been anywhere near as poisonous as Webber/Vettel became, tensions will inevitably rise if the pair are fighting for bigger prizes.
“I’m very confident in what I can do myself, and we go into the season starting from zero, both of us,” Piastri said.
“Last year I proved to myself in a decent portion of the year what I’m capable of, and really took confidence from the wins and better races. Trying to do that every race weekend is obviously the goal.
“With Lando, it’s obvious that he’s incredibly talented and it’s never going to be easy going up against him, but I’m confident in my own ability to try to prevail this year.
Oscar Piastri preparing for the grand prix.Credit: Getty Images
“We’re going to be able to race each other, and we’ve shown we can race each other hard – but cleanly. As long as we’re not taking points off of the team, that’s how we’re going to go racing.”
Last year, as Piastri won in Budapest and again in Baku after doggedly repelling Leclerc in a faster Ferrari, hard, wheel-to-wheel combative racing became his calling card.
Qualifying, where Norris beat Piastri 20-4 over the 24 rounds and by an average margin of over two-tenths of a second, represented a step back on Piastri’s rookie season (a 15-7 deficit), and an area he’s targeted over the off-season.
Having the sport’s fastest car is one thing; putting it into a grid position on Saturdays to best fight for silverware on Sundays is something he knows needs to improve.
“Qualifying is something I wanted to work on, but I think going through a lot of the details and things, it’s not just ‘qualify better’,” he said.
“There’s some specifics that, if I can improve on those, it’ll make everything better. Then you get the confidence and everything naturally helps itself.
“There’s definitely some opportunities we’ve identified and I think if I can work on those, then hopefully those weekends at some points from last season will disappear.
“You can still start to work on those things in the [simulator] and build. The opportunities that I have are things that you can actually work on in the sim.
“I think there was a lot of strengths that I had last year as well … the races in particular, I had to fight for a lot of my finishes, in a lot of cases had to improve from where I started. That side of things, you can’t really work on in the sim.
“I’m happy with a lot of the things I did last season, but some of those opportunities we can already start working on now.”
Right now – this weekend – would be a good starting point, and a chance to end a hoodoo that defies logic.
In 27 previous iterations of the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne, no local driver has finished on the podium. Four times – Webber in 2012, Ricciardo in 2016 and 2018 and Piastri last year – an Australian has finished fourth. Between them, the trio have combined for 84 top-three finishes elsewhere.
Given McLaren appears to still be ahead of last year’s other race-winning teams – Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull – and with all three rivals debuting new drivers this weekend in 40-year-old Hamilton (Ferrari), 18-year-old rookie Kimi Antonelli (Mercedes) and inexperienced New Zealander Liam Lawson (Red Bull), it’s an open goal for Piastri.
Right place, right driver. Right time? In his hometown and in front of a packed house, Piastri will certainly hope so.
