Mark Webber won’t be quite as visible in Oscar Piastri’s orbit this season.
Ahead of the 2026 campaign, it’s emerged that Webber is stepping back from his regular trackside role with the McLaren driver, shifting his focus more towards the commercial and contractual side of Piastri’s programme. The change comes as Piastri expands his inner circle with a familiar name from his junior career: Pedro Matos, the race engineer who worked with him during his 2021 Formula 2 title run.
The headline isn’t that Webber is “leaving” — he isn’t. His management role, alongside long-time partner Ann Neal, remains in place. But the weekly optics will look different. The former Red Bull driver is expected to attend only select grands prix across the 24-race season, with Matos effectively becoming the constant presence at the circuits, attending most, if not every, round.
In a paddock where driver entourages can become as political as they are practical, this is a quietly significant reshuffle. Piastri is entering his fourth year in Formula 1, and it’s no longer a project. After two wins in 2024, he turned into a genuine title contender during McLaren’s dominant 2025 season, matching Lando Norris with seven victories.
For a while, it even looked like Piastri might be the one turning McLaren’s internal story on its head. Following Norris’s retirement at the Dutch Grand Prix last August, Piastri held a 34-point advantage. But the back end of the season was a different tale: only three podium finishes across the final nine races, and the momentum that had been building through the summer bled away.
By Abu Dhabi, it was Norris securing a maiden world championship, with Piastri finishing third overall behind Max Verstappen. It was still a breakthrough season in most teams’ terms — but at McLaren in 2025, “good” had started to feel like the floor, not the ceiling.
That context matters when you look at why Piastri might want an additional voice at the track, and why that voice would be someone like Matos. There’s a comfort to going back to a proven relationship, especially one forged in the pressure-cooker of a title-winning year. Piastri’s 2021 F2 campaign with Prema was ruthlessly efficient: six wins and a championship that put him in the same bracket of recent graduates who got the job done quickly, then moved on. Matos was on the radio for that, and that sort of shared shorthand can be hard to replicate.
It’s also notable that Matos is understood not to be a direct McLaren employee. This isn’t about inserting an extra layer into the team’s engineering structure; it’s about bolstering Piastri’s weekend operation — preparation, debrief habits, decision-making under stress, and the small margins that separate a title push from a title win. Drivers at the sharp end often build that kind of support around themselves, particularly once they’ve had a season where they’ve seen how brutally the championship can swing.
Webber’s own role, then, becomes a little more “chairman of the board” than ever-present consigliere. That may suit all parties. Webber has been at most races with Piastri for years, while also working as a television pundit, and the grind of a full calendar is no joke — especially now that every weekend at the front comes with scrutiny, and every body language moment gets interpreted as a message.
For Piastri, it’s an adjustment, but not necessarily a loss. Webber has been a cornerstone of the programme that got him to F1; moving him slightly out of the day-to-day doesn’t erase that. If anything, it reflects a driver who’s maturing into a more complex operation — one where management, performance support, and the team environment each have to be optimised rather than stacked on top of each other.
Piastri will also continue working with Emma Murray, the Australian sports psychologist who has been part of his set-up. In a season where McLaren will again have two drivers with championship-level expectations — and where last year’s late fade will be the obvious point of self-examination — that continuity on the mental side may be as important as any change elsewhere.
There’s no guarantee that bringing Matos in, and Webber stepping back from the pitlane glare, translates into more points on Sundays. But it does signal that Piastri’s camp has identified something: the next step isn’t about proving he belongs. It’s about making sure that when the championship is there to be won, the operation around him is built to hold its nerve all the way to the finale.
