Oscar Piastri's new F1 support network revealed

Oscar Piastri arrived in Bahrain for the first pre-season test accompanied by two new faces – at least as far as the Formula 1 paddock is concerned.

This represents a direct response to the issues which beset him during the second half of his world championship campaign last season, when he lost a commanding lead in the drivers' standings to a flurry of mistakes and sub-optimal race performances. The winter break provided an opportunity to analyse those critical issues, and as a result he has made changes to the personal staff who work with him during race weekends.

Piastri's management remains in the hands of Mark Webber and Ann Neal, a relationship that dates back to the early stages of his journey in F1. However, this season the former Red Bull driver will step back from his trackside supporting role and focus – together with his wife Ann – on commercial matters.

Pedro Matos will now be by Piastri's side at weekends. Matos was his race engineer at Prema in 2021, the season Piastri finished by winning the Formula 2 title as a rookie. Matos had also worked alongside Piastri in 2017, his maiden season in single-seaters in the British Formula 4 championship.

Alongside the 33-year-old Portuguese engineer, Piastri will continue to rely on someone who has supported him since the early days of his motorsport career: Emma Murray, an Australian mental coach with experience assisting athletes in other sports. This year she will have a much greater presence at the track.

Former Prema engineer Pedro Matos will act as a consultant to Piastri throughout grand prix weekends (Photo by: Getty Images)

This marks a new chapter for Piastri, who is clearly determined to rediscover the harmony that characterised the first half of last season. The arrival of a figure such as Matos – a pure technician with a different profile compared with Webber's – points toward more targeted technical support, free from unnecessary layers of politics.

"I think there was lessons both positive and, well, I don't think there's a negative lesson, but some of them were nice lessons to learn," said Piastri during a pre-season press conference at McLaren's Woking HQ last week. "Some of them were tougher lessons to learn.

"I think some of the lessons in the back half of the year, especially, were very different in nature. I think probably a couple of things in Austin and Mexico from a technical point of view and more of a driving point of view that, let's say I hadn't been challenged on earlier in the in the season.

"So that was probably one lesson to take forward from that. There was a pretty long string of races where it was pretty eventful for lots of different reasons.

"And I think just taking the lessons out of that, and how I can manage those things better, how we as a team can manage those things better. That's probably one of the most important lessons from last year for me, and I feel like I've done a lot of good work to try and learn from that.

Oscar Piastri, McLaren (Photo by: Zak Mauger / LAT Images via Getty Images)

"I think the team has as well. And yeah, we'll make some tweaks, some changes to how we go about things. From every aspect."

Some have interpreted Piastri's choices as confirmation that, regardless of some of the more extreme theories bandied around in the media, his drop in performance during last autumn cannot be attributed to the team sabotaging him or otherwise prioritising team-mate Lando Norris. There were out-of-character mistakes under pressure, such as accidents in Baku and Austin, and Piastri struggled to extract maximum performance from his car in low-grip conditions.

In this context, Matos will represent an independent voice, tasked with supporting the nine-time grand prix winner as a valuable reference point, especially in more delicate moments. Last season there was a notable gaffe when Piastri's social media account amplified the conspiracy theories; this was the work of his entourage rather than the driver himself, but it clearly demonstrated their mindset.

On the McLaren side there are no changes and Piastri will work with the same trackside team as he did last season.