Oscar Piastri was already one of the most promising young talents of his generation when he was made to sit out a season of racing after winning the Formula 2 championship in 2021.
But after being poached by McLaren and given the chance to start his Formula 1 career last season, Piastri showed exactly why his new team were so eager to acquire his talents, as his rookie campaign was perhaps among the most outstanding of the last two decades.
With multiple podium finishes and even a sprint race victory in Qatar, Piastri already had the tools in place to help McLaren push towards the front of the field in 2024 alongside team mate Lando Norris. And over the first 14 rounds of the season, Piastri has done exactly that.
Although McLaren were not quite as far up the grid as they might have hoped at the start of the season, Piastri was remarkably consistent in the opening rounds. Especially in qualifying, where he secured eight top six starts in the opening nine rounds of the championship. His races were solid, but he was perhaps not quite reaching the same level as his Saturdays, as evidenced by his mid-race mistakes in Melbourne and Suzuka.
He also couldn’t quite seem to match Norris’ pace early on in the season, finishing behind his team mate in six of the first seven rounds. But while luck seemed to smile on Norris, Piastri was not afforded that same luxury. While the timing of the Safety Car in Miami worked out perfectly for Norris, Piastri, who had been running second, dropped to fourth as a result, then missed out on scoring any points at all after being hit by Carlos Sainz Jnr at the hairpin.
More misfortune followed in Imola, where he qualified second but was dropped to fifth on the grid for impeding Kevin Magnussen in qualifying in an incident that was solely his team’s fault. He was just 0.15s away from pole in Monaco which would have almost certainly secured him victory, but was forced to spend all 78 laps staring at Charles Leclerc’s rear wing on his way to second.
His only truly underwhelming performance came in Spain. While Norris took pole, Piastri was down in tenth after screwing up his only push lap attempt in Q3. From there, while his team mate finished behind Verstappen in second, Piastri climbed only to seventh, half a minute behind the other McLaren at the end of his worst weekend of the season.
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But after Spain, with McLaren now regular race win contenders, Piastri found the…
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