The lessons Piastri learned from his junior titles for his F1 2025 championship fight

Competing for a Formula 1 championship “feels similar” to fighting for those in the junior categories, says Oscar Piastri, who notes that his intra-team battle with McLaren stablemate Lando Norris is the key differentiating factor.

Piastri won the 2019 Formula Renault Eurocup, 2020 Formula 3, and 2021 Formula 2 titles consecutively before spending 2022 on the sidelines as Alpine’s reserve ahead of his F1 call-up for McLaren the following year.

In his title-winning F3 campaign, he battled for honours alongside Prema team-mate Logan Sargeant – although the dynamics lower down the ladder are very different; every driver effectively races for themselves, since they have usually paid for the entry.

The Australian spoke about the mentality shifts needed between each of his junior crowns; his F3 season was defined by lights-to-flag racing, while his F2 title needed to accommodate the influence of tyre strategy.

Piastri compared those championships to what he is currently fighting for in F1, which has a much more expansive team element involved. He says, at the top level, the focus is on winning every race.

“In a lot of ways it feels pretty similar to championships I’ve raced for in the past,” the 24-year-old told Autosport. “I think for me the big difference is this is the first time I’ve really raced a team-mate so hard for a championship.

“I raced against Logan Sergeant for the championship in F3 but there’s much less involved before you get to F1. There’s no pitstops, there’s no strategy, it’s purely just go out and try and beat each other and finish ahead of each other.

“In F1 you’ve got the added complication of strategy. You’ve got a bunch of different things that can influence results, so that’s been quite a different dynamic in some ways.

“It has put a lot of importance on certain things: being ahead before the pitstops, taking risks at certain point, not taking risks. That’s been quite a different mentality in some ways, but ultimately the position I’m in feels very familiar trying to secure a championship.

“I know the things that have worked for me in the past have not been the same things in every championship, so that’s kind of been the thing for me: there’s not one way of trying to do it.

“In the position we’re in, you can’t just be consistently scoring points. You need to be beating everyone else still because we’re ultimately fighting for first and second a lot of the weekends.

“And if you are constantly finishing second, you can say, yeah, it’s consistently finishing and scoring good points, but if the guy’s winning, if the other guy’s winning all the races, then you know, he’s consistent as well.”

Piastri added that, versus the junior championships, there’s a lot less temptation to calculate the points needed in each ground – F2 has two races per weekend, for example, although the legacy of the COVID pandemic did elevate that to three in Piastri’s title year as the series alternated with F3.

Asked about the common racing driver maxim of taking it ‘race by race’, Piastri agreed that it was a slightly banal turn of phrase – but only because it has its roots in the truth of what it means to fight for a title.

Oscar Piastri, McLaren, Zak Brown, McLaren

Photo by: Andy Hone / LAT Images via Getty Images

“I think in F1 there’s much less temptation [to do the maths] because you’ve only got one race per weekend,” he added. “In the junior championships you often have two, that year in F2 we had three races, per weekend.

“So you can kind of work out on average, but just because that’s happened in the past doesn’t mean that’s going to happen again.

“And I think the saying, taking it ‘race by race’, it sounds boring and kind of is boring in some ways, but it is very true.

“You can’t worry about what’s going to happen in Abu Dhabi and take your focus off what you’re doing in the weekend, especially at the top of F1.

“You’ve got to be on top of your game every single time and any focus you take away from that, means you’re not at the top of your game.

“So as clichéd as it is, it is genuinely about focusing on the race you’re in, trying to score the most amount of points.”