Oscar Piastri was first to arrive in the news conference room at Formula 1’s 2026 Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne, wearing a big smile and cutting the figure of a driver refreshed.
You could understand why. A clean slate from the grind of last year’s title battle against his McLaren teammate Lando Norris. The prospect of his home race in Australia to start a new season. Then there was the impossibility of gauging his own expectations ahead of revolutionized cars finally being unleashed in races and the new driving styles required to master the significant technical changes for 2026.
It all made for a positive buzz.
The cordial nature continued as the journalists’ questions began — mainly from motorsport media outlets – and all was well. Then, after 20 minutes, the Australian press joined the party.
There was an opening question about his mother, Nicole, who is considered a celebrity in Melbourne media circles. The next put the status of McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown as a villain for some Piastri fans — and elements of the home media — over decisions that in Australia were seen as benefiting Norris at the expense of his teammate last year, as their title battle got serious.
Taking the bait to discuss his relationship with Brown, Piastri responded: “Just as a team, not necessarily (just) Zak and I, obviously we had some tough moments through last year. But our relationship has only got stronger.”
The next question was sharper still, delivered alongside a statement of Piastri’s losing margin to Norris — 13 points — in 2025. That is a smaller margin than some might feel Piastri sacrificed around McLaren’s various team orders sagas. The point was to ask whether his 2026 season was more about him finishing ahead of his teammate, or helping McLaren to a third successive constructors’ championship?
“There’s a lot to digest in that question …” smiled Piastri. He’d almost rolled his eyes in the middle.
While the F1 circus usually has the distance to largely ignore the noise of home fans and media in the midst of a global schedule, the season-opening race coming to Melbourne every 12 months provided a pretty handy check-in with where things are at for Australian fans.
And, in this case, how Australia views its No. 1 motorsport son.
Piastri had looked destined to end a 45-year wait for an Australian world champion, as he left the Dutch Grand Prix with a 34-point lead over Norris in late August. Norris had retired from that race due to an engine problem and been largely shaded by Piastri for much of the season to that point, as Norris struggled to pair his speed with the generally mistake-free run his teammate was producing.
And although it all went wrong for him from there — starting at the next race in Italy where McLaren asked him to move aside for Norris after a botched pitstop for the Briton, something Piastri suggested impacted his subsequent performances — Piastri did finish last year with recognition back home. He won arguably the most prestigious sporting award in the country.
The Don Award is named after legendary Australian cricketer Don Bradman and is awarded by the Sport Australia Hall of Fame for sporting inspiration across the year.
In November, it was presented to Piastri’s mother Nicole on her son’s behalf at a Melbourne ceremony — while he still had an outside chance of winning the 2025 championship.
Although Piastri ultimately did not win, Bruce McAvaney, as chair of the award’s selection committee, said on the award’s presentation: “His rise across the past 12 months to become one of the most formidable and exciting drivers in F1 is nothing short of outstanding.
“It’s an elite and foreign world to most of us, but we feel linked to this young man’s challenges and triumphs, lived out in a spotlight that very few sports attract. His superb skill and sportsmanship are matched with a rare maturity and poise in an adrenaline-fuelled arena.”
Those words reveal plenty about how Piastri’s rise was viewed in his homeland last year.
Oscar Piastri greets fans at the 2026 Australian GP in Melbourne. (Joe Portlock / Getty Images)
His arrival was no surprise in F1, but a path well covered and consistently accompanied by the assertion he would follow in the footsteps of Daniel Ricciardo, taking matters up from wherever the Western Australian left them. This was eight grand prix wins between 2014 and 2021 in a high-profile 14-year F1 career.
In 2021, Piastri won the Formula 2 championship as a rookie driver, a year after he’d done likewise in Formula 3. He made his F1 debut with McLaren in 2023.
Through his F1 career, which ended when he was dropped by Red Bull and Racing Bulls midway through the 2024 season, Ricciardo had failed to become the first Australian driver to score a podium result at a home race. He had finished second in Melbourne in 2014 but was later disqualified for a car technical infringement.
And Ricciardo, like Mark Webber in the years before his rise in the mid-2000s and early 2010s, had also failed to become the first Australian F1 world champion since Alan Jones in 1980. Australia’s other world champion is triple title winner Jack Brabham.
Trumping the efforts of Webber and Ricciardo has become an expectation of Piastri, making the sight of events such as Monza last year hard to stomach for his Australian supporter base.
The feeling that Norris was being given a greater hand in the 2025 title battle by McLaren ran deep enough for it to be raised by Australian senator Matt Canavan. In December 2025, he asked the Australian transport department secretary in a committee hearing if what he viewed as McLaren’s bias was costing Piastri the world championship.
Of course, the counter-argument was the mistakes Piastri made during the 2025 season run-in, which were just not present during his first half of the season — such as crashing out of the Azerbaijan GP in Baku — were taking a bigger toll.
The loosening of the emotional control that can hit just when a young driver is in the midst of a first F1 championship fight seemed to be occurring, even if Piastri generally kept a lid on this in his public appearances.
Brown also got the chance to speak at the Australian GP venue Albert Park this week — and did so on Friday morning, when he was asked by another Australian journalist how he felt about the commentary of his team’s decisions last season.
“I thought a lot of it was very inaccurate,” said Brown. “We let both our drivers race hard. They came down to the last race of the year with both within a chance of winning the championship. We were quite proud of that.
“We were prepared for the consequence of someone not winning because we were taking points off each other. Of course, we make mistakes along the way and they’re making mistakes along the way, that’s racing.
“The conspiracy theories and allegations that were made were so far wide of the mark. I’m very proud of how our team and drivers stayed focused and we achieved what we wanted to achieve.
“People are going to have their views but it is shocking at times how uninformed people are in their allegations of what they think we’re up to.”
It remains to be seen whether McLaren has a car in 2026 to challenge for both titles again, and whether Piastri will get the chance to trump his teammate 12 months on. F1 has introduced all-new cars this season, with Mercedes and Ferrari considered the preseason favorites.
But Piastri has made changes he feels will improve his chances this year.
Webber, who acts as Piastri’s manager and has been omnipresent at his side in F1, is stepping back from being trackside and will focus on their commercial matters alongside his wife, Ann Neal.
And in further change, driven by Piastri, as well as supported by McLaren during their off-season review of the 2025 campaign, Pedro Matos and Emma Murray will take up supporting roles in Piastri’s team at every race.
Matos was Piastri’s race engineer in both Formula 4 and F2, but that will not be his new role at McLaren. With Tom Stallard still doing that job, Matos will instead work with Piastri to give technical feedback about what his car is doing that he can then pass on to his team. They hope this will unlock any track performance that was not tapped into last year.
Murray, meanwhile, is an Australian mindfulness and mindset coach who has worked with athletes across various sports. Piastri has worked with Murray since he first started racing, but their in-person interactions have been significantly limited due to her being based in Australia.
In the winter, Piastri asked Murray if she would be able to travel to F1 events in 2026. She said yes.
Piastri drives his McLaren car during opening practice 2026 Australian GP in Melbourne. (Peter Fox / Getty Images)
Not everything is changing, though. Australian burger restaurant chain Grill’d is still offering a discounted burger designed by Piastri. Although it may want to avoid promotions of free burgers for podium finishes this year, which Australian conspiracy theorists pointed towards coinciding with his loss of form in 2025, if only for a week or so around the Melbourne race.
With F1 2026 already underway, Piastri will once again be the driver of the moment for all of Australia.
His face is dotted around every major city. He leads Australian-based advertising campaigns, his caps are worn by parents walking their kids to school nearly 2000-miles away in Perth, on the western side of Australia, and his own merchandise stalls and grandstand seating are present at Albert Park for the first time this year.
Max Verstappen was asked on Thursday — by another Australian journalist — whether he felt Piastri might be carrying some baggage from that brutal title battle last year, into the new season. The Red Bull driver mounted a late 2025 comeback to catapult into the previously intra-McLaren title battle and beat Piastri to second place behind Norris.
“I don’t think so. He looks pretty chilled,” said Verstappen. “He’s a calm guy. He’s very fast. He just needs to do his thing.”
For Piastri, that starts with bringing previously unclaimed success for Australia at its home world championship F1 race this weekend.