Laurence EdmondsonOct 15, 2025, 10:11 AM ETClose• Joined ESPN in 2009 • An FIA accredited F1 journalist since 2011
play2:43McLaren to let Piastri, Norris fight it out for the drivers’ title?ESPN’s Laurence Edmondson believes McLaren should let Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri battle it out for the drivers’ championship now the contructors’ title has been won.
Is Piastri feeling the pressure with the drivers’ title in sight? (2:57)ESPN’s Nate Saunders and Laurence Edmondson discuss the pressure facing McLaren’s Oscar Piastri from the chasing pack now the drivers’ championship is in touching distance. (2:57)
McLaren to let Piastri, Norris fight it out for the drivers’ title?ESPN’s Laurence Edmondson believes McLaren should let Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri battle it out for the drivers’ championship now the contructors’ title has been won.
ESPN’s Laurence Edmondson believes McLaren should let Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri battle it out for the drivers’ championship now the contructors’ title has been won.
If the pressure of this year’s title fight is getting to Oscar Piastri, he isn’t showing it in his interactions with the media.
Asked if the collision, which was a result of Norris attempting to pass Piastri on the inside in the opening three corners, would change the way he races his teammate going forward, his single-word response was completely void of emotion.
Right, but is he worried that as the pressure ramps up in the title fight, it might become hard for the team to remain fair and impartial?
So measured was each response that it was impossible to gauge Piastri’s true thoughts. Over team radio during the race, he had quite clearly raised his objections to Norris’ move, but when given the opportunity to twist the knife in front of the world’s media, he declined.
It’s a personality trait that is as compelling as it is disarming. It speaks to a level of maturity belying Piastri’s 24 years — just three of which have been spent racing in F1 — but should not be confused with indifference. While some drivers rant and rage as events conspire against them, Piastri seems to conspire against the events.
His race engineer Tom Stallard — the voice at the other end of the pit-to-car radio during races — believes Piastri chooses his words carefully as he knows it can amount to a competitive advantage.
“He’s like that because he chooses to be like that, and because that’s something that he values in himself and as an individual, so he goes out of his way to be like that,” Stallard tells ESPN. “Maybe there’s some nature and nurture in there as well, but I think it’s a conscious thing and it’s something that he’s worked on very successfully.
“I mean, he’s a human [so the emotions are there], but he’s conscious of what emotions are going to be positive and what are going to be negative, and he’s just incredibly focused on achieving what he wants to achieve, to the point where he will control that kind of thing to ensure he gets there.”
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella, who worked closely with greats such as Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso during their careers in F1, is also of the belief that Piastri maintains control to gain a competitive advantage.
“I think this is a very different concept to not having emotions. I think this would be completely incorrect. It’s just the awareness of your emotions, the way you respond, how visible you make it. I think this is more the trait in which Oscar appears as a controlled person; it’s not in the emotions themselves or the intensity of the emotions that are generated.”
Where that trait came from is undoubtedly complex, but as Stella points out, it was likely formed at a young age.
His first step toward racing came at 6 years old when his father, Chris, returned from a business trip to the U.S. with a remote-control monster truck. It instantly became young Oscar’s prized possession and soon led to him entering the world of competitive remote-control racing in national championships.
“My dad came back with this remote-control monster truck, and I started driving that around the backyard, the school oval, a BMX track at one point,” Piastri recalls in an interview with ESPN. “And once I started kind of being OK at handling it, then my dad asked if I wanted to race because he had one as well. So we went and raced that for fun, and yeah, that led to more serious RC racing for three or four years.”
Piastri won his first national championship in RC racing at the age of 9. Using nothing but his exceptional hand-eye coordination, he was able to control a 70-mph RC car and beat far more experienced opposition, many of which were grown men in their 20s and 30s. It was far and away his favorite hobby up until the day he first sat in a go-kart.
“Sometimes the RC cars, especially at that point, you couldn’t drive them in the rain,” Piastri says. “So there were a few times where we used to race on Wednesday nights every week, and sometimes it would be rained out, and my dad started taking me to the hire go-kart track instead.
“And yeah, once I’d done that a few times, someone asked if I wanted to go in a real kart, and then I had to go. Very quickly RC cars went by the wayside.”
Although Piastri wasn’t aware of it at the time, his father was weighing up the future of Oscar’s career as he watched his 13-year-old son line up 21st on the grid for the 2014 IAME X30 world finals in Le Mans, France. Chris needed to be convinced those sacrifices would be worth it. He needed to see a performance that would convince him Oscar had what it took to succeed.
“Yeah, that race was pretty major,” Piastri recalls. “That was my first international race, and like, 2014 was really kind of the first year where I started having more success. I didn’t really know at the time, but it was kind of the feeler for how I would cope with it.”
When Piastri carved through the field to stand on the podium and claim the fastest lap, Chris’ mind was made up.
“I really enjoyed the experience,” Piastri says. “Obviously, when you walk away with the podium, that was even better.
McLaren to let Piastri, Norris fight it out for the drivers’ title?
“But I think that was kind of a bit of a test for my parents, or especially my dad, on how I was going to cope with it and whether I was good enough to kind of chase that, really. And yeah, I think the result of that weekend kind of made that a bit clearer.”
In his first year at his new school, he spent more than 100 days at kart circuits across Europe as his on-track results continued to gather momentum alongside his studies. But for as big a change as moving to the other side of the planet must have been for the teenage Piastri, he doesn’t remember being affected by it.
“It wasn’t like I was completely fending for myself or having to do everything,” he says. “I didn’t have to cook my own food, I had to put my laundry in the right baskets, but I didn’t even have to wash my own clothes!
Reflecting on the experience now, Piastri believes it may have contributed to his personality as an adult and his ability to manage his emotions so effectively when the pressure is on.
“I think there’s definitely an element of just the life experiences, you know? Moving to Europe when I did and I think also just experiences in racing,” Piastri says. “It’s a pretty cruel business at times, so I think just learning the lessons from that and ultimately becoming stronger from that’s been probably been one of the bigger things.”
“He is particularly gifted in keeping his, we call it bandwidth, but we can call it processing capacity, brain power — there’s really not much noise in his head,” Stella explains. “He’s just focused on the important things.
Stallard says Piastri’s ability to focus on what’s important also makes the job easier for those working around him, which in turn allows them to find solutions to help Piastri.
“In the race, his ability to process information has always been good,” Stallard says. “He doesn’t necessarily say a lot, but generally what he says is really high-quality, accurate information that we can actually work off.
But when Stella is asked where Piastri has made the most progress now that he is fighting for a title, the answer is surprisingly simple.
The potent combination of pace, intelligence and mental fortitude are among the reasons why Piastri has led this year’s drivers’ championship since his victory at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix in April. But the true test of his calmness under pressure will be at the final six races of the season — starting this weekend in Austin, Texas — as he attempts to close out the title ahead of Norris and four-time defending champion Max Verstappen.
“I think we’re both quite well placed to handle that pressure. You’re right in that the pressure is going to ramp up, but people say pressure is a privilege. That pressure is something that he’s worked for, for let’s say 10 years, arguably more, in order to be in a position where he can have that pressure. And it’s very rare that you get to be world champion without being able to ride that pressure.
Is Piastri feeling the pressure with the drivers’ title in sight? (2:57)ESPN’s Nate Saunders and Laurence Edmondson discuss the pressure facing McLaren’s Oscar Piastri from the chasing pack now the drivers’ championship is in touching distance. (2:57)
ESPN’s Nate Saunders and Laurence Edmondson discuss the pressure facing McLaren’s Oscar Piastri from the chasing pack now the drivers’ championship is in touching distance. (2:57)
“No,” again without so much as a quiver in his voice.
“This doesn’t exclude that he’s actually a sophisticated thinker, but quite essential, a very clever person, but limiting in a way the inner dialogue to what is essential to make the progress that we need to make and deploying at times even a large degree of common sense. So I think these are qualities that allow, together with his speed, allow him to process what’s happening in a very efficient way and then absorb the learning which keeps him in such a steep trajectory of development.”