Formula 1: Oscar Piastri on track to help McLaren win $273 million constructors’ title

Rising Australian Formula 1 star Oscar Piastri is on track to help McLaren to a 25-year first, valued at more than a quarter of a billion dollars.

Quickly closing in on the end of his second season in Formula One, rising Australian star Oscar Piastri is on track for another notch on his belt valued at more than a quarter of a billion dollars.

Crowned rookie of the year in 2023, Piastri is on the verge of steering McLaren to its first constructors’ championship since 1998, three years before he was born.

The team title doesn’t carry the same street cred as the drivers’ championship, which Max Verstappen has already secured for the fourth year in a row, but it’s still got a lot of clout in the garages on pit lane.

As well as bragging rights, there’s also a big chunk of money at stake, with the winning team set to bank an estimated $273 million, ensuring their two drivers each pocket some handsome bonuses.

Only three Australian drivers - Jack Brabham (1959, 1960, 1966, 1967), Alan Jones (1980, 1981) and Mark Webber (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013) have been part of championship winning teams - all doing it in their 30s. But Piastri could soon join them at age 23 after winning grand prix races in Hungary and Azerbaijan this season.

Oscar Piastri has won two grand prix races this season

With two rounds to go, McLaren leads the constructors’ race with 608 points. Ferrari are on 584, 24 behind, with Red Bull 53 adrift on 555. With a maximum 103 points up for grabs in the final two rounds of the season, no other team has any chance.

McLaren can clinch the title at this weekend’s Qatar Grand Prix if they can gain another 21 points over Ferrari and stretch their current 24-point lead to at least 45, with only 44 available for the final race in Abu Dhabi.

While difficult, it’s not impossible because there are 59 points at stake in Qatar as the first stop on the concluding Middle East leg also includes a sprint race, worth a maximum 15 for any team that finishes one-two.

Suited by the circuit’s high-speed corners, Piastri won last year’s Qatar sprint then finished second in the main race while Norris was third in both, so hopes are high, especially with both McLaren drivers now free to race each other.

Piastri agreed to help Norris when he was chasing Verstappen for the drivers’ title, even giving up a win in the sprint trace at Brazil to his teammate, but with the championship decided it is everyone for themselves now.

Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri are hoping to give McLaren its first constructor’s championship since 1998

“We get on well, I think our working relationship is very, very good,” Piastri told this masthead in an interview at Monaco midway through the season,

“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.

“From the moment that I joined the team, we’ve always had very, very similar feedback on what we want from the car and from the team. And I think for everybody, that’s always a beneficial thing.

“There’s never been anything hidden or any animosity or anything. It’s always been very open. The benefit of that is, firstly for the team and being able to develop the car, but I feel like we’ve been able to push each other.

“When you’ve got two teammates where one of you is half a tenth quicker in this corner and the other is half a tenth quicker in the next and so on, you’re constantly improving each other. 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.”

Originally published as Formula 1: Oscar Piastri on track to help McLaren win $273 million constructors’ title