McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella believes Oscar Piastri has all the ingredients necessary to be a potential Formula 1 World Champion. Stella spent 15 years at Ferrari before moving to McLaren in 2015, working closely with title winners Michael Schumacher, Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso. McLaren CEO Zak Brown has previously labelled Piastri as a World Champion in the making and Stella leaned on his own experiences to explain the qualities Piastri possesses. "Drivers that have the potential to become World Champion need to have a natural speed, which we saw straight away [with Piastri]," Stella told media, including RacingNews365.com . "Then they need to have the head, the capacity, the capability to use their talent, which Oscar establishes in an interesting way. He keeps his head very clean of disturbances. "It seems like he has a strong aptitude to learn, because he doesn't distract himself from learning, from focusing, and we saw these straight away, also in testing, and then in the early races of the season."
Piastri showing talent in competitive car
A difficult first half of 2023 for McLaren meant Piastri only scored four points across the season's first nine races. However, after a raft of updates transformed the competitiveness of the MCL60, the Australian took his chance to race at the front, finishing fourth and fifth in the British and Hungarian Grands Prix. Piastri also took second place in the Sprint at Belgium in the last weekend before F1's summer break, and Stella noted that Australian had looked at home at the sharp end of the grid. "It became more apparent, as the car became competitive, that he can compete at the top of Formula 1," said Stella. "So his natural talent, his capability to learn, and then he is a good person [with] a set of values and ethics. "I think these three elements are part of a World Champion-craft that we can see in Oscar."
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