Oscar Piastri is characteristically straightforward in setting the target for his third season in Formula 1, boldly stating “I want to win the world championship this year”.
Whether the car is competitive enough for this remains to be seen, but whatever happens he must beat Lando Norris to have any chance of making his dream come true.
So is he ready?
There’s no doubting Piastri’s qualities at his best. He’s already won two grands prix, his Azerbaijan Grand Prix victory last year turning on an opportunistic pass on Charles Leclerc at a point where the team urged caution because of the need to bring the tyres in after his pitstop.
That’s just one example of Piastri’s razor-sharp racecraft, another being his move on Norris on the opening lap at Monza last year. Combined with his ice-cool mentality behind the wheel, this makes him a formidable racer.
It also ensures he heads into 2025 laser-focused on beating Norris, even if he won’t say it publicly.
By his own admission, other aspects of his game must still improve. That’s inevitable for any driver of his experience and despite some strong performances last year, Piastri was emphatically the second-best of the two McLaren drivers.
Qualifying is the obvious area for improvement, as where a fair pace comparison can be made he was on average 0.163% (which equates to 0.144s) slower than Norris.
However, there were also several weekends where he struggled for speed, and even on strong weekends he often lacked Norris’s race pace. As with all drivers, the key challenge is replicating his best work more consistently – and Piastri has an idea of how to improve this.
“It’s building up the resilience to be able to adapt a bit quicker in the weekends,” said Piastri when asked by The Race what the key is to improving his consistency.
"Effectively, if the weekend started bad, in those weekends it was difficult, especially if it was a sprint weekend, to then make the progress back towards the front. We’ve gone into a lot of detail on how we can be better prepared for this season and some of the more specific driving opportunities.
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“Qualifying is something I wanted to work on, but it’s not just 'qualify better'.
"There's some specific things that if I can improve on those, it'll make everything better. And then you get the confidence, and everything kind of naturally helps itself.
"So there's definitely some opportunities we've identified and if I can work on those, then hopefully those [difficult] weekends, at some points from last season, will disappear.”
Resilience is an interesting choice of word. Not only will that encompass recovering well if things start badly, but also recognising what needs to change quickly in terms of set-up or driving technique in such circumstances.
Last year, the team complimented Piastri on how quickly he was getting up to speed in free practice, demonstrating the expected improvement for a driver after their rookie season, but now that must be combined with taking quick, corrective action if all is not going well. His capacity to do that will be augmented by his growing experience.
Piastri has also spoken regularly about the need to make gains with the Pirelli tyres. He has made significant progress, but as he said last year “even if you’re in your 10th season with these tyres, you’re still going to be learning little things here and there given how difficult they are”.
Norris sets a high bar when it comes to tyre understanding, both in terms of how to make the most of them over a qualifying lap and also on race stints, which gives Piastri the ideal benchmark.
Norris has also proved himself to be a hugely adaptable and intelligent driver, one who has been experimenting with his style and technique from the start in F1.
Particularly with this generation of cars, there’s significant laptime to be found in how you approach braking, particularly when it comes to the trade-off of steering lock to brake application.
Piastri has a high tolerance for a pointy car, a trait that is beneficial provided you can control the rotation. It’s the driving style Michael Schumacher had so much success with, and that Max Verstappen does today – albeit with the adapted braking approach demanded by these heavy, long ground-effect cars.
It’s therefore about refining his technique and expanding his driving toolkit to better apply his prodigious skill to these unwieldy cars.
It stands to reason that Piastri will get better with experience. Having had the chance to digest the lessons of 2024, a season which ended with an underwhelming run, he should be better at putting together the pieces on a weekend and squeezing those last fractions out of himself and the car.
Realistically, that’s where he is now. There’s no big single weaknesses to tackle, no major troubles to crack, it’s now simply about ruthlessly extracting the best from himself and the car to produce the consistent speed needed to match or even outpace Norris.
If he can do that, in a car that’s quick enough, there’s no doubt he has the racecraft, robustness and ruthlessness to achieve his ambition.
