Oscar Piastri has spent the winter doing what every driver does after coming close to something big: taking a mental inventory, deciding what mattered, and trying to turn a season’s worth of noise into a handful of usable truths.
He didn’t end 2025 as world champion — that honour went to his McLaren team-mate Lando Norris — but Piastri’s own read of the year is telling. It’s not regret he’s leaning on, but progress. The sort that’s easy to miss from the outside because it doesn’t fit neatly into a results table.
For long stretches of last season, Piastri looked like the man to beat. He led the Drivers’ Championship for much of the year and at one stage held a 34-point advantage. Then came the wobble: a run of six races without a podium, a drop-off that coincided with a Norris surge and a Max Verstappen rebound. By the time Piastri found his rhythm again late on, the title fight had slipped out of his hands and third place was the best he could salvage.
That arc can read like a missed chance, but Piastri’s framing is different. He’s treating it like the first proper stress-test of his title credentials — and in his third F1 season, it was always going to be a little raw around the edges.
“I mean, just trying to look at it like that, acknowledge the good moments and the bad,” Piastri said. “I think every single season is going to have its ups and downs, and that was certainly the case last year.”
What seems to have struck him most isn’t the pain of the slump, but the fact that 2025 contained “significantly more ups” than his first two campaigns. That’s not the language of someone spooked by coming up short; it’s the language of someone who believes the baseline has moved — and who knows the margins are now about polish, not reinvention.
There’s also a quieter, more personal lift he’s carrying into 2026. Piastri went back to Melbourne over the off-season and found the temperature had changed. The attention, the recognition, the everyday moments where fans clock you in the street — all of it, he said, had jumped.
“It’s going to be a busy season once again, and obviously, opening in Melbourne is great. Very busy, though,” he told 7News. “It’s nice to be going into the new season starting from home. The level of support in Melbourne has always been fantastic. But the last time I went home over Christmas, not long ago, the support was up another level.
“So I’m looking forward to going back home and racing.”
He expanded on what that actually looked like away from the circuits: “A few more people knew who I was. And I think for me, the biggest thing was just how many people said, well done, or just kind of acknowledged me in the street or wherever I was, was very cool.
“Even though the result of 2025 wasn’t exactly what I wanted, the support was fantastic all the way through. It was nothing but positivity, which was great.”
In a sport that can be brutal about momentum — where a driver can be crowned “the next one” one month and questioned the next — that sort of grounding matters. Piastri isn’t pretending it wins him points, but it clearly feeds into the wider reset: arrive at 2026 with energy, not baggage.
And 2026, of course, isn’t a normal season to start fresh. The sport’s regulation overhaul has reset the reference points, and Piastri was frank about how much of the early work is simply about discovery. The car and power unit demand different things, and the much-discussed emphasis on energy management is already shaping how drivers talk about performance. Everyone’s relearning what “fast” looks like — not just in one corner, but across a lap and across a stint.
“Still figuring out, I think,” Piastri admitted, when asked if he’d identified the tools he needs to take the next step.
The interesting part is that he split the problem in two. There are lessons from 2025 that aren’t necessarily about driving style or set-up direction. They’re broader — how he approaches a weekend, how he manages a season, how he navigates the inevitable patches where the results don’t match the underlying pace.
“You always learn more in the tougher moments or the bad moments,” he said. “I think I definitely learned some lessons and things I can take forward into 2026 through that, but also, proved to myself more than anything, that when I get everything together and kind of maximise my potential, that it’s good enough to win races.”
Then there’s the purely technical reality of 2026: the need to build a new relationship with the machinery, quickly. Piastri pointed out that in previous seasons the cars, year to year, broadly rewarded similar inputs — the differences were often “subtle tweaks”. This time it’s more foundational. Testing isn’t just mileage; it’s a hunt for understanding.
“From previous years, it was kind of all the cars, year to year, needed the same driving style… Whereas this year, we’re getting to know what the car likes, what it doesn’t like, what the power unit likes, what it doesn’t like. So there’s much more kind of experimentation and exploration on that side of things.”
That’s the undercurrent to watch as the season opens at Albert Park. Piastri isn’t selling revenge, and he isn’t making grand declarations about destiny. He’s talking like a driver who’s been close enough to a title fight to know what it costs — and who understands that in a regulation reset year, the sharpest advantage can be clarity. Not just in the cockpit, but in the head.
If 2025 was the season he found out he could lead a championship, 2026 is the season where he has to prove he can finish the job. Starting at home, with a country suddenly a little more aware of what it’s watching, is about as good a place as any to begin.
