“I can be world champion”

Ahead of his second Formula 1 season with McLaren last year, Oscar Piastri could feel an awkward “weaknesses” he wanted to address. Now, as his team launches its 2025 challenger, he’s crystal clear he has what it takes to become world champion.

After all, the 2024 campaign that ended with McLaren as constructors’ champion was just Piastri’s sophomore year. 

And it started with many questions over whether he could improve from a still impressive 2023 campaign to match established team star Lando Norris in the critical areas of tyre management and help make McLaren a grand prix winner again.

But Piastri rose to the challenge – arguably starting the year just as strong as Norris, before his team-mate found a critical edge just when McLaren transformed its MCL38 with a massive development upgrade in Miami.

Norris won there, before Piastri was able to get close enough to attack him at the start of the Hungarian GP he would go on to win – after an uncomfortable team orders saga late on.

Piastri, who produced a stunning drive to win again in Baku, eventually ended up supporting Norris’s doomed bid to topple Max Verstappen as drivers’ world champion, but only after they raced each other too hard and lost a further win at Monza.

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari SF-24, 1st position, Oscar Piastri, McLaren MCL38, 2nd position, Lando Norris, McLaren MCL38, 3rd position, on their slow down lap

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Now, with McLaren’s MCL39 challenger viewed by many as the pre-2025 season favourite, Piastri says he and Norris are “definitely” starting the new campaign “on a clean slate” – but within himself he now feels capable of producing another performance step that could help yield F1’s ultimate prize.

“I do think that I can become world champion this year,” Piastri told select media including Autosport on Thursday.

“I feel like 12 months ago I was going into the season still with some weaknesses that I wasn’t particularly confident with.

“Through last season I addressed them. It’s now just about addressing them every weekend and making sure that I’m putting my best foot forward every weekend and that is what is going to be the difference.

“I’m confident and I think we’ve still got some things to work on. I’m definitely not the finished product but I don’t think anyone necessarily is.

“If we can work on some of the things that we’ve set out to do in this off-season then I’ll have a lot of tools to be able to try and make that happen.”

Oscar Piastri, McLaren MCL38, Lando Norris, McLaren MCL38

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Piastri ended the 2024 campaign feeling his main discrepancy to Norris had come down to regularly being slower in qualifying (they ended the season with a 20-4 record for all counting sessions in Norris’s favour, with Piastri fourth in the drivers’ standings while his team-mate was runner-up).

But as he faced the F1 press corps fresh from spending his longest period back home in Australia since he had moved across the world to start his motorsport career, Piastri revealed that now he has spent time working with McLaren on its new simulator this off-season, he has discovered there are other – so far unspecified – areas of his driving game that he feels must improve.

“We’ve gone into a lot of detail on how we can be better prepared for this season and some of the more specific driving opportunities,” he explained.

“I said at the end of last season qualifying is something I wanted to work on, but I think going through a lot of the details and things, it’s not just qualify better.

“There’s some specifics that if I can improve on those, it’ll make everything better. Then you get the confidence and everything naturally helps itself.

“There’s definitely some opportunities we’ve identified and I think if I can work on those, then hopefully those weekends at some points from last season [where Norris was clearly McLaren’s quicker driver] will disappear.

Lando Norris, McLaren MCL38, 1st position, takes the chequered flag as his team cheers from the pit wall

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

“You can still start to work on those things in the sim and build the right things. I think the opportunities that I have are things that you can work on in the sim.

“I think there was a lot of strengths that I had last year as well. The races in particular, I had to fight for a lot of my finishes that I had last year and in a lot of cases had to improve from where I started and I think that side of things you can’t really work on in the sim.

“I’m happy with a lot of the things I did last season but some of those opportunities we can already start working on now.”

When it comes to both McLaren drivers starting 2025 as potential title contenders, Piastri was also confident of how things stood in terms of rules of engagement.

“We are going to be able to race each other,” he said. “We’ve shown time and time again that we can race each other hard but cleanly and as long as we’re not taking points off the team then that’s how we’re going to go racing.”