Mark Hughes: Cool head wins McLaren F1 contract extension for Oscar Piastri

McLaren’s announcement at Suzuka that it had extended Oscar Piastri’s contract to the end of 2026 was no great surprise given the 22-year-old’s enormously promising rookie season. He has been a much closer match to the team’s established star Lando Norris than Daniel Ricciardo had managed in the previous two years. On occasion, such as at Spa, he has even out-performed him. But it’s the manner in which he has conducted himself which has convinced McLaren, specifically its team principal Andrea Stella, about his ultimate potential.

It’s not just Piastri’s natural speed, but the way in which he fits with the culture Stella is engendering, which is key. What does that mean? To get that requires an understanding of Stella himself. He made his name at Ferrari as a performance engineer for Michael Schumacher and Kimi Raikkonen before becoming Fernando Alonso’s race engineer there. He followed Alonso to McLaren where he took on a more senior engineering role in which he deployed a calm, creative intelligence made all the more effective by a quietly warm and friendly personality. He has fantastic people skills and has been a key part in changing what was sometimes a cold and paranoid environment into a much warmer, more open place. Zak Brown has understood this and given him ever-greater responsibility until he now effectively runs the shop, leaving Brown to attend to business.

So for Stella, getting the best from any of the hundreds of talented people in a race team and aligning them all in the same direction despite their natural personal competitiveness, is about understanding their strengths and giving them the environment in which they can be nurtured and deployed to maximum effect. It’s a process of growth. A driver, as a touchpoint of the organisation, someone from whom many take their inspiration, has an important role to play in addition to his skills in the car. Stella sees Piastri as the embodiment of what he wants McLaren to be.

“Formula 1 is a highly professional business, highly competitive, but it is run by humans and executed by humans,” he says. “The foundations for how you generate the positive feelings, the positive state of mind in which people offer their best, they have to do with humans. So showing confidence, proving the trust, proving the belief: they are fundamentals and we want to leverage performance on these fundamentals… We wanted to show very early that we don’t need any convincing about Oscar. We are totally happy that we want our future to be with Oscar. And we were delighted when he said pretty much ‘You know what? I agree, I’m thinking the same’.”

Stella has worked with the greats, knows what he’s looking at when assessing drivers. No two are the same, but they all have exceptional qualities. Piastri, he insists, exhibits important ones. “There’s his natural speed but then there’s his awareness of his own performance, saying this is where I am, this is where I need to improve. It was matching so well with what we saw from the data. This self-awareness in relation to speed is a gift and this drive to improve, to be open to improve all the time is very much like Fernando.”

“His speed and drive to improve all the time is very much like Fernando ”

Those internal qualities drive Piastri’s personal performances but it is in the externals, the way he interacts with the team, that Stella sees parallels with another of his old charges. “He makes me think about Michael [Schumacher],” he says. “Michael was tough on the track, as we know, but inside the team he built a family. Oscar is someone, who if he wasn’t a Formula 1 driver I would still appreciate as a person, and would enjoy being around him.

“When you are in a pressurised environment like Formula 1, it becomes very important he’s a calm, considerate person. He doesn’t have nervous reactions. He doesn’t have unnecessary irritation. He doesn’t add tension in his comments. His comments are a genuine report of what happens with a car. You can trust what he’s saying; he’s not adding anything speculatively because he needs to promote himself. This calmness is a quality I want to strengthen as much as possible throughout the team. There’s already enough reasons to be tense. Nobody should create additional [tension] through behaviour or the way you speak to your colleagues. So he’s calm, he’s very considerate with his words, he’s very considered with the way he presents himself.”

There was a big update for the car at Singapore but only enough parts for one car. Priority was given to Norris, with Piastri getting the upgrade at Suzuka a week later. The way he handled that decision impressed Stella further. “At no point during the Singapore weekend did we have any annoyance, any comment like ‘I’m here a little slower, but obviously the other one has the new package’. And this means that everyone listening, everyone looking at the person, gets something by example. That’s the fit with the culture. Leaders – and drivers are definitely leaders in a Formula 1 team – lead by example and Oscar you can trust is gonna do it. Even when he has a disadvantage. But if we hadn’t delivered his upgrade when we promised, I know he’d have been pulling me up about it, saying, ‘Hey, you said this but it hasn’t happened.’ He has that balance.”

Since he began covering grand prix racing in 2000, Mark Hughes has forged a reputation as the finest Formula 1 analyst of his generation
Follow Mark on Twitter @SportmphMark