There’s a version of this sport where the best driver in any given season is also the most discussed one. Verstappen made that true for three years running. But midway through 2026, the driver producing the most consistently controlled, technically precise racing is doing it without much noise attached to his name.
Oscar Piastri has been this way since he arrived at McLaren in 2023 — composed to the point of seeming unremarkable, until you look at what he’s actually doing on track. He doesn’t spin under pressure. He doesn’t make contact trying to manufacture passes. When the car is good, he extracts everything from it; when it isn’t, he doesn’t crater the race trying to overcome the deficit. That kind of discipline is genuinely rare, and it tends to get undervalued because it doesn’t produce the clips that go viral.
The Lando Problem
Part of why Piastri gets overlooked is structural. Norris is the more publicly beloved McLaren driver — he’s been at the team longer, he streams, he has a personality that translates well to media, and he’s been close to championships before. The narrative already existed for Lando. Piastri arrived into that narrative as the secondary thread.
But results don’t really support a hierarchy anymore. Over the past season and a half, their head-to-head qualifying and race pace numbers have been closer than most people acknowledge, and there have been stretches where Piastri has simply been the faster driver. McLaren’s public positioning hasn’t shifted much to reflect that, which is its own interesting dynamic for the team to manage.
What Makes Him Different
His tyre management stands out most on street circuits, where degradation is harder to predict and mistakes compound quickly. He tends to run longer first stints than his rivals gamble on, not because McLaren is forcing it strategically, but because the pace drop-off simply doesn’t come at the rate it does for others. Whether that’s technique, setup preference, or some combination isn’t something I can say with certainty — but the pattern is consistent enough to be real.
He also rarely makes the same mistake twice in a season. There’s something almost methodical about the way he improves, which is more of an engineering trait than a racer’s instinct. In a sport increasingly defined by data and marginal gains, that matters more than it used to.
Whether the championship will eventually reflect what he’s doing on track is the open question. McLaren’s car needs to hold up, the strategy calls need to land, and F1 has a long history of the most complete driver not winning the title in any given year. But the case for Piastri being that driver right now is getting harder to dismiss.