Formula One 2023 has been all about Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing dominating the sport, with the former winning 11 out of the 13 races while Red Bull is still undefeated this year. With little competition at the top and the winner a foregone conclusion on most weekends, the interest in the championship has taken a drastic hit.
But despite the dominance, there are exciting sub-plots that one can watch out for down the grid. Even though most of the narratives have been around how the rival teams have failed to pose a strong challenge to Red Bull, there are also glimmers of hope further down the field.
One such example is the performance of McLaren driver Oscar Piastri, who made his F1 debut this year.
Though professional sport is all about numbers and numbers don’t lie, in the case of Piastri, the other expression, ‘numbers don’t tell the whole story,’ is equally apt.
On the face of it, Piastri has scored just 36 points with a best finish of fourth, and his teammate Lando Norris has outperformed him with 75 points, including two podiums.
Norris also leads 11-2 in qualifying and 10-3 in races in the head-to-head battle. So, by these metrics, one would be fair to assess that the young rookie has yet to cover himself in glory.
But these numbers tell half the story. Dig a bit deep, and one can see why McLaren paid Daniel Ricciardo not to see out his contract and hire another Australian with no F1 experience.
For starters, his teammate is one of the fastest drivers on the current grid and is in his fifth year in Formula One and has been embedded in the team well.
More importantly, the young Australian was also dealt a bad set of cards right from signing the deal last year. Even before he turned a wheel in F1, he was put through the wringer after being embroiled in an ugly contract saga involving Alpine and McLaren.
Enviable record
Piastri had an enviable record in the junior category, having won the F3 and F2 titles as a rookie in 2020 and 2021 before spending 2022 as a reserve driver for the Alpine F1 team.
When Fernando Alonso left Alpine, the team quickly announced Piastri as the team’s driver for 2023. However, conspicuous in the press release was a lack of quotes from the driver, which is standard procedure, raising a red flag.
Unsurprisingly, a few hours later, Piastri posted a social media post saying the team had made a unilateral announcement and that he wouldn’t drive for the team in 2023.
His tweet set off a series of unwarranted attacks on his character by the Alpine top honchos and even from some rival team bosses, saying that he has not repaid the faith the team showed in supporting his career at a junior level.
Eventually, when the issue went to the Contract Recognition Board of the FIA, it became clear Alpine never had a valid contract tying him to the team, and the team’s delay in giving clarity on his future meant he had to look for other options. McLaren was quick to react to this development and signed the Australian.
There was massive pressure on him as he had replaced an eight-time Grand Prix winner in Ricciardo, even though the latter had struggled for the last two years at McLaren.
To make things worse, a wrong design decision made last year meant the McLaren was one of the slowest cars on the grid in the early part of the season. During those tough races, Piastri kept improving every weekend without making many mistakes or crashing, even though the gap to Norris was more than a few tenths.
Slowly, the team developed the car and got a significant upgrade in Austria, which helped the former champion vault up to the sharp end of the grid and fight for podiums.
Even as Norris finished fourth in Austria, Piastri was outside the points as only the former had the car with the new upgrades. Fortunately, from the following race in Silverstone, Piastri also got the latest upgrades, and the difference between the two drivers has shrunk and is almost negligible now.
At the British Grand Prix, the 22-year-old from Melbourne qualified third behind his teammate by just less than a tenth of a second. In the race, he was on course for a podium but got unlucky with a Safety Car that came out just after he pitted, while Lewis Hamilton, who had stayed out, got a free pit stop behind the pace car and got the jump on the Piastri.
In the following race in Hungary, the young driver did well to finish fifth despite picking up car damage early, which led to a performance loss in the car. And just before the summer break, in the Sprint Race at the Belgian GP, Piastri finished second to Verstappen after taking the lead from the reigning champion at the start.
These runs of races have given the youngster much-needed momentum and justified McLaren’s faith. Though he crashed for the first time in Zandvoort last weekend during free practice - his first big crash in F1 - he made amends on Sunday by driving on dry tyres on a damp track without making many mistakes, showing that he has nerves of steel and is also a quick learner.
Now that he is almost matching his teammate, the Aussie driver has to show he can start beating his teammate and be ready to make the most of any opportunity if it arises to grab a podium, even as he is learning on the job.
For someone who came into the sport in far-from-ideal circumstances with off-track politics distracting from his glittering junior ladder CV, Piastri has now firmly found his feet in the big league.
