F1 News
Piastri is ready for a title fight: 'I have all the tools I need'
- Savannah Lenz
Oscar Piastri is looking to add to his list of championships. The Australian driver won both the Formula 2 and Formula 3 championships and is now looking for the cherry on top. While he has only had two seasons in Formula 1, he admits that he is ready to battle it out with the big guys, namely Max Verstappen.
Piastri was one of the seven race winners last season. He stood on eight podiums, including two where he was on the top step, Hungary and Azerbaijan. Piastri ended up placing fourth in the overall championship but has indicated that he will be ready to make it harder on his rivals in the forthcoming season.
'I have all the tools I need'
During a conversation with Motorsport, Piastri admitted, “I feel like now I'm getting to a stage where on certain days, I feel like I have almost all the tools that I need. I'm just not putting them together as much as I want to, and I feel like last year, I didn't have all the tools that I needed. I had some of them, but I still was missing some".
The 2024 season was a good season for someone who was still fresh on the grid. With only one previous year under his belt, he managed to outscore multiple drivers, including Carlos Sainz, George Russell and Lewis Hamilton. On the topic of the 2025 season, he said, “I feel like now this year, if I don't have all of them, I certainly have a lot more – and whether that's race pace, qualifying, racing other people, I feel like I've shown good moments of that, or even in some of those areas. I've just been generally very happy across the board.”
"Just putting it all together a bit more is, I think, what's going to be needed." He concluded, "But I feel like I have all the tools I need. I just need to be able to deploy them all the time.”
One of the hugely debated calls of the season was Mclaren's use of "papaya rules." Critics and F1 analysts are still discussing the decision not to prioritise Lando Norris over Piastri after the season is over. Could we see a repeat of papaya rules in 2025?
This article was written in collaboration with Jeroen Immink.
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