Why McLaren extended Oscar Piastri ahead of the 2025 F1 season

Oscar Piastri put pen to paper on a contract extension just ahead of the 2025 F1 season. With good reason

In the weeks before the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix, back in October of 2023, McLaren CEO Zak Brown looked me square in the eye and made a straightforward declaration about the team’s driver pairing of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri.

“Best driver lineup of the grid when you look at a combination of experience, age, talent,” said Brown that October.

At the time it was on the bolder side of statements, as those go. McLaren had caught Aston Martin in the previous weeks, to sit fourth in the Constructors’ Championship at that point in the season. Red Bull’s Max Verstappen had already clinched his third Drivers’ title, at the Qatar Grand Prix, and was nearing the end of a season that would see him win all but three grands prix. But Brown was clear, McLaren’s duo was the best on the grid, and for a few reasons.

Now he will have that driver pairing for a few more years.

McLaren announced a new “multi-year” contract extension with Piastri on Tuesday, days before the 2025 F1 season begins at his home race, the Australian Grand Prix. Piastri’s contract was due to run out at the end of the 2026 season, but now both he and Norris will be with the team through 2027.

As the news broke, my thoughts drifted back to that conversation with Brown in 2023.

“I think clearly Lewis [Hamilton] and George [Russell] are awesome. But Lewis is, you know, towards the near of his career as opposed to the start,” continued Brown that day.

Brown then spoke of Piastri’s maturity, which he described as beyond the driver’s years. An apt description even if Piastri was just 22 at the time.

“He has been fantastic. I think it’s been the best rookie season since Lewis Hamilton, at least that’s what everyone keeps telling me,” said Brown about Piastri. “He has all the same qualities Lando has just, what he doesn’t have is the experience Lando has. But as far as his natural skill, his determination, his maturity, you know, he’s 22 years old.

“But a lot of young drivers are over eager on Friday, and they get themselves in trouble, and then they never recover and have a good weekend because they spent time getting their car repaired.”

Piastri, however, “creeps” up on a race weekend.

“Oscar kind of creeps up on it, he uses Friday as a test session and that’s exactly what Friday is, a test session. And he doesn’t get, which a lot of rookie drivers do get lulled into the, ‘I wanna win Friday free practice’ and then they end up not focusing on Sunday.

“So that takes a maturity to be able to come into a race weekend and be, mature enough and confident in your own abilities to look at the team timesheet on Friday and go, ‘oh, I’m a little further down than I’d like to be.’ But that’s because he’s thinking about Sunday. Not about Friday.”

I asked Piastri about that description days later, just ahead of the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix. He summed up his approach this way:

“I’ve tried to use Fridays to learn as much as I can, you know, to get things wrong because if you’re gonna get them wrong on Friday, it doesn’t matter,” described Piastri. “But if you get it wrong on Saturday in qualifying, that’s when it bites.”

That maturity saw Piastri break through with his first two Grand Prix victories in 2024, first at the Hungarian Grand Prix and later at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix following a thrilling battle at the front with Charles Leclerc. That maturity also saw McLaren finish the year atop the standings, as Norris and Piastri powered the team to their first Constructors’ Championship since 1998.

Later this week a new season will begin, and McLaren will look to their driver lineup to try and reach the mountaintop once again. And Piastri will once more “creep” up on a race weekend, building to the crescendo of a Grand Prix Sunday.

But with both Piastri and Norris locked in for the next three seasons, their title chances extend beyond just this year.