What you don’t know about Aussie McLaren star driver Oscar Piastri ahead of the Melbourne Grand Prix
Australian star Oscar Piastri reveals the truth about life on the F1 circuit and the biggest misconceptions people have about drivers ahead of the season opener in Melbourne. Click inside for a full Q&A with the star McLaren driver.
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Australian F1 star Oscar Piastri arrives in Melbourne this week as a genuine world title contender after his team McLaren won last year’s constructors’ championship.
Piastri peels back the misconceptions of life as a F1 driver, his true workload on race weekends, his fears, his relationship with Lando Norris and his hunt for a maiden world title.
When did you start preparing for the 2025 season?
“Pretty much in the back half of (last) season. Once the next year’s calendar comes out, we’re literally starting to book hotels that day and making rough plans of things. When you try to plan your life around 24 race weekends, which effectively becomes 24 weeks, you’ve got to be extremely organised because it’s not just race teams and drivers trying to get hotels, it’s hundreds of thousands of people trying to watch as well. It’s the same for the guys building the car for us. They also start pretty much in the middle of the season the year before.
What sort of physical training do you do to keep fit?
“When you get to F1, you have power steering but the G-Forces are off the scale so your neck takes a massive beating and it’s obviously not a very conventional muscle to train. You still need strength, because your core or your lower back takes a bit of a beating. So I work on cardio and in the gym, depending on the week. If it’s a race week in Europe, for example, normally we will get to the race either Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning, so I’d do a lighter recovery day on Monday then a full training day. If there’s no racing, then you train the whole time. But when you’re going to Asia or off to the Americas, with all the travelling and jet lag, you just get in what you can when you have the chance.
💪💪 pic.twitter.com/recAl1Krm6
— Oscar Piastri (@OscarPiastri) February 5, 2025
How many flights do you catch each year?
“Far too many. We’ve got 24 races, so that’s at least 48 flights. And then you’re flying to the sim (simulator), pretty much before every race. So I would probably say double that - about 100. A lot of the European stuff is private but a lot of the flyways are all commercial. A lot of the drivers live in Monaco, so we all kind of try to go together just to make it a bit more efficient logistically.”
How many nights do you sleep in your own bed?
“I think last season we added it up and it was maybe 100. So it’s just over three months. So it’s not a lot. And the longest period you kind of have in one go is maybe a full week if you’re lucky. But normally if you can get three or four days, that’s a decent stint.”
When do you take holidays?
“We have two summer shutdowns. There’s the European summer, where the whole of F1 stops for two weeks and none of the engineers are allowed to work so there’s nothing going on in the factory. They’re not allowed to work with us as drivers. Then over Christmas, I normally go back to Australia.”
How busy are race weekends?
“On the Thursday, we’re at the track basically the full day and it’s a mixture of preparing the weekend with the engineers and sort of talking through what we think the strategy might be and what our ideas on the set up are. Because the season is so busy, you usually go over a little bit of what’s happened the weekend before, so you have a bit of a debrief of that and talk about what you can learn for the next one, which is the part that’s incredibly important for us. The other half of the day is with the media and with sponsors, so a lot of interviews.
There’s five or six of us that get called to the press conference and the rest have to do interviews with all the broadcasters, one to one interviews, sponsor, videos and stuff like that. So Thursday is a pretty full-on day.
On the mornings of Friday, Saturday, Sunday, we’d always be doing something, whether that’s with sponsors or guests, we’ll speak to them for 10 or 15 minutes. There’s also a Paddock Club appearance where we speak to the fans and lots of stuff that goes on outside of just the drive. We have a lot of meetings and engineering briefings and stuff like that before the session. We don’t just rock up to the track ten minutes before the session and jump in, we’re there usually three or four hours before the first session of the day, and we won’t leave the track till probably three or four hours after the last session of the day. So it’s a long time spent there every day.
Had to be green and gold pic.twitter.com/b1NO2bFj1C
— Oscar Piastri (@OscarPiastri) March 6, 2025
When do you eat and what do you have?
“I’ve got a full time physio and trainer that goes to all the races with me and he will work with the team. There is a catering team within the team, because it’s not just me and my engineers and stuff, it’s over 100 people and they all need to be fed. Myself and Lando will have a dedicated chef each to make the food that we want and the food that we need. There’s a lot of co-ordination with the engineering team and the marketing office on when I can have my lunch and stuff like that. Normally on a Friday or Saturday, when we’ve got the two sessions each day, normally you’re having lunch in the middle of the engineering debrief or you’ve got 10 or 15 minutes after. You do have some time in the middle to relax and sort of chill out for a bit but with just how the session timings work, you’re normally pretty hungry by the time you finish the first session of the day and you’re eating through the briefing really. Someone normally brings it to me, I eat it and it gets taken away. All the important stuff, like the engineering and marketing, I obviously take part in, but some of the little things are taken care of for us so I don’t have to spend ittle bits of energy everywhere.
What is the biggest misconception about driving an F1 car?
“The physicality of an F1 car is something you can only experience by driving an F1 car. I think a lot of people also kind of maybe assume that we just turn up on the Friday morning, jump in the car and leave Sunday night, but that doesn’t include all the hours of work throughout the year between engineering meetings, marketing and the simulator. In some ways, driving the car is almost the smallest portion of our job, but also the most important. We spend so much time doing other things, speaking to the engineers, talking to our sponsors and doing commitments with them, so I think it’s the stuff away from the track that often people don’t really get a sense of.”
How do you stay relaxed when you’re driving at speeds up to 350km/h?
“Calmness is certainly one of my strengths. It’s partly a personality trait and partly a conscious effort, it doesn’t just happen for me. Some people need a bit of red mist or a bit of aggression or whatever it might be to perform at their best. For myself, sometimes I do need a bit of a kick, but I feel like for the majority of situations, being calm and collected is the best way that I work. It’s not an easy sport. You spend a lot of time losing and not winning, and you spend a lot of time in difficult situations on track. So I think it’s just accepting those kinds of situations.
You left home at 15 and moved to England to chase your dreams. Do you ever regret it?
“There’s no regrets at all. I did miss out on things in life but I’m certainly not missing out on things now that I’m achieving my dream job and get to travel the world and you see a lot of things that a lot of people in their life never do. So, maybe a very small sacrifice in some things but ultimately, the life that I dreamed of.
How did winning your first Grand Prix (in 2024) change things?
“Not a lot, to be honest with you. Getting the first one out of the way was nice. It was a very special day and an incredibly special achievement so early, but it was more just a bit of a confidence boost than anything else.”
How are you getting on with your teammate Lando Norris?
“Our working relationship is very, very good. Even our relationship away from the track is good. We’re not spending every weekend at each other’s house or anything like that, but we get along, we fly to a lot of places together. It wasn’t that long ago that we were joking about fighting each other for one-twos. I think we joked that maybe our relationship would change when that happened, but we’re in that position now, which is pretty crazy to say, and our relationship is exactly the same.”
Can you win the drivers’ championship in 2025?
“For me, setting those kinds of big goals, especially result based goals, is never really something I’ve done. Now that we have a car that can win pretty much every weekend, the goal is to try and win every weekend but if the car is not capable of winning, then you’d never try to force it or become desperate to achieve something that’s not possible. If we keep the progression that we’ve got, then yes there are going to be the highest of stakes on the table. But you don’t win a world championship by saying ‘I want to win the world championship’”
How will you handle the extra attention you get in Melbourne?
“There’s a lot of hype and I guess expectation but I also quite like that. If you’re not getting spoken about in F1, it’s because there’s nothing really that exciting going on for you. The fact that we’re at the front of F1 is a very, very cool place to be. It’s been something to get used to definitely, having people recognise you on the street or the supermarket or wherever it might be is a bit different to how I imagined life about five years ago, but it’s very cool and part of the territory.”
Does anything scare you?
“Not really about racing. There are always the risks, of course. There’s been a few people that have been seriously injured or killed since I’ve been racing and it’s always a pretty blunt reminder of the risks that are there in motorsport. Of course, they’re astronomically less than what they were 30, 40 years ago but we never really think about it. Outside of racing, I probably wouldn’t be the first person to jump out of a plane. I’m not a big fan of sharks, not a big fan of snakes but I’m okay with spiders because they’re small enough.”
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