Numbers that prove Oscar Piastri is ready to break a 45-year wait for an Aussie F1 world champion

Is this another false dawn for Australia’s F1 fanatics – or is Oscar Piastri actually the real deal? JULIAN LINDEN crunched the numbers to prove the McLaren driver is destined to break a 45-year wait.

Unafraid to dream big, Oscar Piastri is challenging Australian motor racing fans to join him in believing the impossible is possible.

If not a battler, because he comes from a wealthy family, but still an underdog in the cut throat world of Formula One, Piastri has been installed as the favourite to win the 2025 world championship after a brilliant start to the season.

Defying the odds, Piastri has won three of this year’s first five races to open up a handy 10-point lead in the drivers’ standings and with no signs of slowing down.

The interest and hype around him is building with each race.

But can a quiet, polite kid from suburban Melbourne really win one of the biggest prizes in world sport?

Australia’s next champion? The numbers point to Oscar Piastri being the one. Picture: Getty

Or is this just another false dawn for all the petrolheads whose hearts were broken when first Mark Webber then Daniel Ricciardo came up short after looking like world beaters?

The answer won’t be known for some time yet because the F1 season is tortuously long, featuring 24 rounds that don’t finish until early December.

In a sport where one wrong turn of the wheel can spell disaster, there’s still a long road ahead, but the ones he’s already travelled offer some encouraging signs that Australia’s 45-year title drought really could be about to end.

Like most Grands Prix races, championships are invariably won at the start rather than the end, because whoever gets in front gets to take control.

While nothing beats sheer speed, there’s plenty of other factors that go into winning championships, including reliability, team strategies, tyre management and driver composure.

One of the ironies in a sport in which everything happens at frighteningly high speed, is that one of the fastest ways to success is the ability to slow things down and stay patient when things don’t go to plan.

Mark Webber (L) was the second-best driver in the world in 2010 – but Red Bull teammate Sebastian Vettel (R) was the world champion. Picture: Getty

That’s one attribute that can’t be taught. Drivers either have it or they don’t and Piastri has it in abundance.

Sometimes mistaken for being dull, his ice-cool demeanour is what sets him apart. Piastri rarely makes mistakes and when he does, he stays calm and composed.

A case in point was at this year’s season-opening Australian Grand Prix.

Desperate to win in front of his home fans, he was closing in on his McLaren teammate Lando Norris for the lead late in the race when he got caught in a sudden shower and slid off the track into the wet grass.

Frustrated, a lot of drivers might have given up and hitched a lift back to the garage but Piastri had a sudden flashback to how he’d once retrieved a tractor out of the mud.

So he manually shifted the car’s sequential gearbox into reverse and backed out on to the circuit to finish ninth, gaining two consolation championship points.

Oscar Piastri overtakes Red Bull Racing driver Liam Lawson during the Australian Grand Prix. Picture: David Caird

It is an underrated skill but as he told CODE Sports in a rare sit-down interview at an apartment in Monaco last year: “Calmness is certainly one of my strengths.

“Some people need a bit of red mist or a bit of aggression or whatever it might be to perform at their best,” he said.

“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 the track.

“It’s just trying to be accepting of the situation and looking at what you’re going to do next.”

What came next for Piastri was immediate success.

He claimed his first career pole position then won the Chinese Grand Prix.

After finishing third in Japan, he’s won the last two rounds in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to become the first Australian since Webber in 2010 to lead the championship, and the first Aussie since Ricciardo in 2014 to win back-to-back races.

While neither Webber or Ricciardo won the world title – both finished third in the standings – the cards are falling Piastri’s way.

As the championship leader with the first quarter of the season nearing completion, all the historical data leans heavily in Piastri’s favour.

The first five races have proven a reliable guide to identifying the champion long before the last bottle of Champagne is sprayed on the podium at year’s end.

In the 15 completed seasons since the current points system was introduced – whereby the top 10 finishers all receive points, scaled down from 25 (first place) to one (10th place) – every eventual champion has won at least one of the first five races.

That cuts this year’s list of contenders from 20 to three as only Piastri, Norris and four-time world champion Max Verstappen, have won this season.

Of the past 15 champions, 13 led the standings after five rounds.

The other two eventual winners were still in the top three, but neither had won three of the first five races. The stats are stacked in Piastri’s favour.

The other big indicator that speaks to Piastri’s chances of winning the title this season is how quickly he’s rocketed from a rookie to a race winner since making his F1 debut in 2023.

Having just celebrated his 24th less than three weeks ago, Piastri is aiming to become just the fifth driver to win the world title before his 25th birthday.

And like the other four – Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso, Sebastian Vettel and Verstappen – Piastri has wasted no time leaving his mark on the sport, winning five of his first 51 Grand Prix to put himself in contention to win the title in just his third season.

Including Nino Farina, who won the inaugural world championship in 1950, just seven drivers have won the title within their first three seasons: Juan Manuel Fangio (1951), Alberto Ascari (1952), Denny Hulme (1967), Emerson Fittipaldi (1972), Jacques Villeneuve (1997) and Hamilton (2008).

Originally published as Numbers that prove Oscar Piastri is ready to break a 45-year wait for an Aussie F1 world champion