Oscar Piastri is F1’s in-form driver, says Karun Chandhok

It’s fair to say that since Miami, every single grand prix has been good to watch. The Azerbaijan Grand Prix was an enthralling contest with the jeopardy of a street circuit and the potential for overtaking down the high-speed start/finish straight. The fact that we had the top three drivers, from three different teams, covered by less than 3sec for most of the final half of the race was truly special.

I thought that Oscar Piastri’s drive in Baku was outstanding. It really was a coming-of-age performance which underlined that he’s no longer a star of the future but in fact a star of today. If we take away the first seven races of the season and hypothetically for a moment said that the season started in Monaco, in the 10 rounds until Baku, Piastri would be the championship leader with 169 points versus 153 for Lando Norris, 152 for Max Verstappen and 122 for Charles Leclerc.

This is, of course, only Oscar’s second season in Formula 1 and there are still races where he isn’t able to match Lando’s race pace. The progress from last year has been very impressive and you only have to look at the race win in Hungary in contrast to the struggle in 2023 and you’ll realise just how much better he has become at tyre management. The qualifying pace has always been strong but there’s no hiding the fact that we are very much in a tyre-management era of F1, a huge departure from anything we regularly saw in the 25 years prior to Pirelli’s arrival.

George Russell summed up the frustration well in Baku when he recalled his race – 15sec lost to the leaders in the first stint of just 14 laps, 0sec lost in total in the next stint of 37 laps and the only thing that changed was the tyres went from yellow sidewalls to white ones! Getting an understanding of the Pirellis is tricky even for experienced drivers in the best teams.

A couple of key things that really make Piastri special are: (a) his race craft is top notch; and (b) he makes very few mistakes resulting in hardly any damage to the car. At Monza, there was a huge amount of speculation around whether McLaren will ask Piastri to back Norris’s bid for the drivers’ championship. The Brit took pole by a fraction but by the second chicane there was no doubt that team orders were not going to be in play. It was a risky move around the outside, especially on his team-mate, but no contact was made and much like the move on Leclerc in Baku, it showed supreme confidence on the brakes.

Personally I think that if McLaren wanted to have team orders and chase the drivers’ title, it needed to impose it after Silverstone. Norris was 84 points behind Verstappen after the British GP, with momentum on his side and Piastri was a full 47 points behind Norris. It chose to wait until Baku before coming up with some orders to favour Lando but in a Mark Webber-esque “not bad for a number two driver” performance, Oscar is now much closer to Lando than Lando is to Max.

“In one sense I do admire McLaren’s reluctance to issue team orders”

In one sense I do admire the team’s reluctance to issue team orders. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone use the phrase “our values” more than Andrea Stella on the Thursday media day in Baku and it feels like he’s playing the long-term game. If Oscar carries on with this trajectory and gets the confidence from more wins, then he could well be a title contender, which is good for the big picture, even if it hasn’t helped Lando’s bid this year.

In terms of other young stars making an impact, both Franco Colapinto and Oliver Bearman had excellent runs in Baku for Williams and Haas. Neither driver was near the top of the F2 championship standings before their switch to F1 and neither is Mercedes golden boy Andrea Kimi Antonelli. This has created some question marks in the F1 paddock about how much we should all be reading into the F2 standings at the moment. Rewind a few years and the likes of Piastri, Leclerc, Russell, Alex Albon and Norris were all top contenders in F2 and that earned them their F1 seats whereas the last two champions, Felipe Drugovich and Théo Pourchaire, haven’t made the step up and the drivers who did graduate so far this year were sixth, ninth and 15th when they got their deals signed!

There has been a new car introduced into F2 this year and perhaps that is creating some fluctuations in the performances of the teams but by and large it’s been very hard to just look at the results sheets and judge the drivers. However, with Jack Doohan confirmed at Alpine, on top of Antonelli and Bearman, if we get a young hotshot like Gabriel Bortoleto into Sauber that will mean 20% of the grid will be fresh blood which is great for F1 and the pyramid of junior formulas below it.

A former racing driver in Formula 1, WEC and Formula E, Karun Chandhok is an analyst for Sky Sports F1
Follow Karun on Twitter @karunchandhok