Oscar Piastri, the Melbourne-born Formula 1 star who drives for McLaren, is a preternaturally level-headed 24-year-old.
You see it in his affable demeanor and mellow-spoken social media clips—but it’s also reflected in his quiet mettle on the track, most recently at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix in Jeddah, where team Red Bull’s Max Verstappen (the winningest F1 driver in recent years) moved aggressively into the first turn, only for Piastri to slip past and hold the lead for the next 50 laps en route to victory. Verstappen, typically a bit brusque in interviews, gave the Aussie his flowers. “[Oscar is] very solid,” he told the press. “He’s very calm in his approach, and I like that.”
After taking the win in Jeddah, as well as in Bahrain a week beforehand and in Shanghai two races prior to that, he’s now in first place on the F1 leaderboard, with 19 Grands Prix still to go. (His McLaren teammate Lando Norris, 25, is in second.) As F1 hits Miami this weekend—and with a chance to lock in a rare threepeat—you’d expect anyone in Piastri’s shoes to be…well, revved up. But of course he isn’t.
“Don’t get me wrong—it’s a cool thing to have at the moment,” says Piastri, flashing a wry smile, of his current standing. Having just flown in from Nice, he’s meeting us ahead of a company dinner at the New York Stock Exchange before heading off to the Magic City the next morning. “But I want to be leading the championships after round 24—not just after round 5.”
Steadfastness seems to be a through line across his life, both on and off the track, but while it comes across as innate, Piastri admits that keeping an even keel requires a fair amount of maintenance.
“A large element of it comes naturally, but there is a conscious effort to, let’s say, maintain it and make it into a greater strength,” he explains. “I still feel pressure; I still get nervous—it’s not like there’s nothing there at all. It’s about how you suppress or channel the feeling in the right way. Working on the mental side of things... you need to know yourself in a lot of ways.”
In the two short years since his McLaren debut, Piastri has carved out a real presence as a rising Formula 1 star in the US, catching momentum from Netflix’s Drive to Survive—widely credited with expanding the sport’s American footprint—and the addition of two stateside races besides the long-established Austin Grand Prix: Miami (debuted in 2022) and Las Vegas (launched in 2023). He’s part of F1’s surging Gen-Z vanguard, speeding toward the celebrity profiles of marquee champions like Verstappen and Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton (who will be co-chairing the 2025 Met Gala on Monday).
Piastri’s undramatic disposition has yielded some standout performances, sure, but it’s also the contrast between his dry introspection and Norris’s cheekier extroversion that’s driven much of his online popularity. The teammates’ differences—Piastri nearly stoic, Norris definitely goofy—is clear, but they seem to complement each other nicely, two oddfellow peas in a papaya orange pod.
“I think the most important thing is that our feedback on what we want from the car—both now and in the future—and where we want the team to go has always been of a very, very similar picture.” Piastri smiles again, adding that he and Norris have been known to get into a laughing fit or two. Though they don’t spend too much time together away from race weekends, they are real friends, not just colleagues.
As for that car: It’s the exceptionally speedy McLaren MCL39, and Piastri is obsessed. “The single fastest car in the world right now,” he says with a kind of boyish reverence. His fascination with all things automotive began early—he started karting at age 10—and has never waned. When asked what his main interests are, he doesn’t hesitate: “Cars. Always.”
“If I’m not racing, then I’m probably on the simulator at home,” he says. “I’ll drive GT cars, lower Formula cars, single-seaters. I don’t have any kind of major hobbies or passions—yet—outside of racing, because racing is the hobby, the passion.”
Still, he makes time to downthrottle. He enjoys playing padel, the fast-growing racquet sport, and prioritizes time with his longtime girlfriend, Lily Zneimer, in Monte Carlo, where they live. “We like day trips or weekend trips,” he says, “usually somewhere close to Monaco.” When flying, if he can’t sleep, he’s “working through Breaking Bad. I’m a bit late on it. I watched all of Prison Break last year. And I listen to a lot of house and drum and bass music. Not, like, heavy drum and bass—I draw a line somewhere in the middle of that genre. But those are my go-tos.” Among his playlist regulars: fellow Australian acts like Dom Dolla and Fisher.
A photo of Piastri arriving at the track in Jeddah recently made the rounds in F1’s digital circles—his fuss-free outfit of a plain white tee, khaki shorts, and a schoolboy backpack in sync with his overall comportment. “My look is no-frills,” he says, “and it’s not particularly adventurous.” Nonetheless, his plainclothes aesthetic has become something of a signature: a non-fashion fashion statement that “does have a bit of renown now,” Piastri admits.
It’s becoming more and more clear that the track runs both ways: Piastri may keep relatively quiet about his achievements, but the same seems to apply regarding his frustrations. Instead of worrying, he zeroes in on fixes he wants to make. Take his recent struggles during 2024’s qualifying rounds, which he admits were a weakness. Rather than letting them get to him, he grinded—methodically, tacitly, and in deep discussion with “his side of the garage”—knowing that every tiny tweak counts, and that in the end, when all the engineering is said and done, it’s up to him to find the improvements on the circuit. It’s here that a shift occurs in conversation: His calm, it turns out, isn’t the full picture—it’s the shell around a hyper-focused core. His outlook suggests that intensity doesn’t need to be loud.
“Maybe you save a hundredth of a second by being a bit fitter,” he said. “Maybe you save another by being a little lighter. Maybe it’s one more by making the car’s setup just a little better. On their own, those sound small. But together—suddenly, you’re half a tenth quicker, and maybe that puts you on top. Everything matters.”