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McLarenOscar Piastri is an Australian Formula One driver racing for McLaren. He is the only driver in history to win the Formula Renault, Formula Three, and Formula Two championships in successive seasons. He has nine Formula One race wins across three seasons, more than any Australian driver except Mark Webber, who is also his manager. He finished third in the 2025 World Championship, 13 points behind his teammate Lando Norris, having led the title by 34 points earlier in the campaign.
He is 24 years old and in his fourth F1 season.
| Full name | Oscar Jack Piastri |
| Date of birth | 6 April 2001 |
| Birthplace | Melbourne, Victoria, Australia |
| Height | 178cm |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Current team | McLaren |
| Car number | #81 |
| Father | Chris Piastri, founder of HP Tuners |
| Manager | Mark Webber |
| Heritage | Italian, Yugoslavian, Chinese (paternal); Scottish, Irish (maternal) |
Oscar Piastri grew up in the Brighton suburb of Melbourne with his parents and three younger sisters: Hattie, Edie, and Mae. His mother Nicole raised the family while his father Chris built HP Tuners, an automotive software company that would later become central to funding Oscar's racing career.
His father's attention to motorsport was present from the beginning. Oscar's bedtime stories as a child were frequently automotive books. When Chris Piastri was travelling on a business trip and Oscar was six years old, he came back with a radio-controlled car. Oscar began racing it in the backyard.
At nine he was competing nationally with Remote Control Racing Australia and won the secondary class of the national championship. He had not yet sat in a kart. The competitive instinct, and the technical engagement with machines, preceded the formal racing career by several years.
He moved to karting after the RC racing and progressed through Australian national championships with his father serving not only as financial backer but as kart mechanic, trackside, at the races themselves.
In 2015, when Piastri was fourteen, he and his father moved to Hertford, England, to continue his racing career in European competition. Six months later, Chris Piastri returned to Melbourne to run the business. Oscar stayed.
He was fourteen years old, in a town in Hertfordshire, competing in European junior motorsport. The fact appears in one source and in almost no editorial profile. It is the personal cost of his career's European phase and it is entirely consistent with the pattern visible across this driver series: the people who reach Formula One are generally those for whom the personal sacrifice was made early and was made completely.
Piastri competed in karting across Australia and Europe from 2014 to 2016, building a record of regional titles while establishing himself within the international junior ecosystem. By 2016 he was competing in European karting and had attracted sufficient attention to move into single-seaters.
Piastri made his single-seater debut in F4 UAE in late 2016 before competing in British F4 in 2017 and European F4 in 2018. He accumulated podiums and race wins, developing the race craft and technical discipline that would define his junior championship seasons. He was snapped up by the Alpine Academy in 2020, but the groundwork was laid in these less-watched F4 years.
Piastri joined R-ace GP for the 2019 Formula Renault Eurocup and won the championship. He took seven race victories across the season, winning the title by a margin that confirmed his readiness for the next step. It was his first major international championship and the beginning of a three-year sequence that had no precedent in the history of the sport.
Piastri joined Prema Racing for the 2020 FIA Formula 3 Championship and won the title at his first attempt. The season concluded at the final race at Mugello, where he needed to win to take the championship. He won. The margin at the end was three points. The three consecutive titles that became his defining biographical fact very nearly ended at the second one.
He was sixteen podiums in total across the season, including multiple wins. He was named to the Alpine Academy the same year. Formula 2 was next.
Piastri stayed with Prema for the 2021 FIA Formula 2 Championship. He won on his second race. He went on to take six victories and stand on the podium at every round across the season, with six fastest laps and five consecutive pole positions across one stretch. He won the title with two rounds to spare.
He was the sixth driver in history to win the GP2 or FIA Formula 2 championship as a rookie. He was also, at the conclusion of that season, the only driver in history to win Formula Renault, Formula Three, and Formula Two in successive seasons.
Three titles. Three years. One team for two of them. His father's HP Tuners had contributed up to A$6.5 million in sponsorship across those years. The investment had produced something historically unprecedented.
After winning three consecutive championships, Piastri had no Formula One seat for 2022. Alpine retained their existing drivers and he served as their reserve, spending the year in the simulator and at test sessions rather than on a race grid. It was the year he waited.
In June 2022 he was offered a loan seat at Williams for 2023. He did not take it. In August 2022, Fernando Alonso announced he was leaving Alpine for Aston Martin. The seat was now available. Alpine then published a press release announcing that Piastri would be their 2023 driver.
He had not agreed to this. He rejected it via Twitter approximately two hours after Alpine published the announcement. He stated plainly that he had not signed a contract and would not be driving for Alpine in 2023.
Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer responded by criticising Piastri's actions and questioning his "integrity as a human being." He stated that he expected loyalty from the driver Alpine had developed, and threatened legal action.
It emerged that Piastri was instead in negotiations with McLaren. The matter went before the Formula One Contract Recognition Board. The Board ruled in Piastri's favour. His McLaren contract was valid. He would be joining McLaren in 2023.
The institutional vindication was complete. A 21 year old driver had publicly rejected a press release issued without his agreement by an established Formula One team, been subjected to a personal attack on his character by its team principal, taken the dispute to a formal regulatory body, and won.
The episode established something about Piastri that has been a consistent feature of his F1 career since: an unhurried, precise manner of handling high-pressure situations that reads as composure but which he has since suggested is somewhat misread. He is not as emotionally opaque as he appears.
Piastri made his Formula One debut at the 2023 Bahrain Grand Prix alongside Lando Norris. McLaren were not yet frontrunners and the car at the start of the year was a midfield performer. He scored his first points at the Australian Grand Prix, his home race.
At Suzuka he finished third, his first F1 podium. At Qatar he won the Sprint race from pole, becoming the first driver to win a Sprint from the Sprint shootout pole on their first attempt. He finished second in the Grand Prix at the same weekend.
McLaren offered him a multi-year contract extension after fifteen races. He won the Autosport Rookie of the Year award, the FIA Rookie of the Year award, and the BRDC Bruce McLaren Trophy. He finished ninth in the championship with 97 points. Given where the car started the year, it was a composed and credible beginning.
McLaren arrived at 2024 with a significantly faster car and Piastri exploited it immediately. At the Hungarian Grand Prix he won his maiden Formula One race, becoming the fifth Australian to win a Formula One Grand Prix in history. He won again the following weekend in Azerbaijan.
He was fourth in the Drivers' Championship at the season's end. He and Norris together drove McLaren to the 2024 Constructors' Championship, the team's first since 1998, a gap of 26 years. His contribution was not incidental. Two race wins and consistent points delivery across a season in which McLaren needed both drivers to perform at every race was exactly what the team required.
The 2025 season was Piastri's most complex and, depending on how it is framed, his most remarkable or his most painful.
He won seven Grands Prix. He took thirteen podiums. Both are Australian records in Formula One, surpassing Daniel Ricciardo's career win total and equalling Mark Webber's, who was watching from the pit wall as his manager. He led the World Championship for much of the season. At one point his lead stood at 34 points.
Then the second half of the season unravelled. He went through a run of races without winning. Norris and Verstappen closed. At the Abu Dhabi finale, Verstappen won the race, Piastri finished second, and Norris finished third. The championship went to Norris by 13 points.
Piastri lost a 34-point lead and the title by 13 points. The arithmetic of those two numbers together represents the defining event of his career to date. He described the season as one he could be "proud" of. He also identified, specifically, the area he needed to improve. He did not deflect or generalise. He named it and moved on.
He has said publicly that his projected image as unflappably calm and emotionally horizontal does not accurately represent who he is. Martin Brundle said he was "misread" in 2025. Whether the real Piastri, under pressure in the second half of a title fight, is different from the composed version the paddock observes is the question that 2026 may begin to answer.
Piastri enters 2026 contracted to McLaren until at least the end of 2028. Zak Brown has called him a "future world champion." Christian Horner, watching from Red Bull, backed him to "bounce back." Both assessments are grounded in the same evidence: a driver who at 24 has already won more Formula One races than all but one Australian in the sport's history.
McLaren trailed Mercedes and Ferrari in early Barcelona testing numbers. The 2026 regulation reset does not guarantee McLaren's 2024 and 2025 competitiveness will transfer. What it does guarantee is that Piastri begins the new era with more race-winning experience than almost any driver of his generation.
He is calm, precise, and 24. The title is the obvious next thing. He has said so, directly, without performing certainty he does not have.
Piastri lives in Monaco. He has spoken about the pressure of public attention and managing a public persona that he considers only partially accurate. His three younger sisters remain in Melbourne. His father's company HP Tuners, which funded his junior career, continues to operate in the automotive software sector.
He describes his heritage across four national lineages: Italian, Yugoslavian, and Chinese from his father's family; Scottish and Irish from his mother's. He is the 15th Australian to have started a Formula One Grand Prix.
| Year | Team | Races | Wins | Podiums | Points | Position |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | McLaren | 22 | 0 | 2 | 97 | 9th |
| 2024 | McLaren | 24 | 2 | 12 | 292 | 4th |
| 2025 | McLaren | 24 | 7 | 13 | 330 | 3rd |
| 2026 | McLaren | — | — | — | — | In progress |
Career totals: 9 wins, 6 poles, 26 podiums, 70+ race starts
Last updated March 2026
