3 Things You Didn’t Know About Oscar Piastri

His racing career didn’t start with karting

Ask any F1 driver about how they got started in racing and chances are they will tell you about their first childhood experience behind the wheel of a go-kart. And while Piastri has certainly had a very successful karting career, with no less than 10 titles and 14 top-three championship finishes, that is not where he got his start in racing. In fact, long before he ever got behind the wheel of his first kart, he had already been racing cars of a different sort: ones that are quite tiny compared to the beasts he drives now, and which require a remote control. 

Piastri was racing radio-controlled (RC) cars from the age of six and, unsurprisingly, he wasn’t too shabby at it.

“There is basically the top class and then the second class,” Piastri explained in an interview shortly after winning the 2020 Formula 3 Championship. “I won the second class when I was nine, which was pretty cool. That was the highlight of my RC career, but I definitely raced them competitively - it wasn’t just around the backyard. I think when I won the national championship, the next youngest competitor was 17.”

He and his father even considered it as a career prospect but they ultimately decided against it given his age and the amount of travel attending competitions would entail. But it still played a key role in his career today and getting him behind the wheel, in a more literal sense. 

“Someone we met through RC had a daughter with a go-kart and I had a go on that,” Piastri said in that same interview. “Pretty sure I spun on my out-lap when I hit the brakes, but I loved it and within a week I had my own.”

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Formula 3 champion without a single pole

When it comes to racing, Qualifying sessions often feel like they make or break a driver's weekend, particularly with the amount of pressure there can be on securing pole position. But Piastri's F3 run in 2020 showed that that is absolutely not the case, because across the entire season he never once started a race from P1. In fact, he never even started from the front row, with his best grid position being P3 during the first and seventh rounds of the year in Austria and Great Britain respectively.

One of Piastri's most impressive drives of that year happened in Monza. After a tough Qualifying and a three-place grid penalty for driving too slowly and impeding another competitor, Piastri found himself starting all the way back in P15. During the race itself, however, he clawed his way back up to the front, ultimately earning himself a spot on the podium with a third-place finish.

Performances like this, which show Piastri's ability to handle pressure regardless of where he is starting from and to make the most of any situation, are ultimately what earned him the title in his first and only year in F3. That alone is impressive enough, but doing it without a single pole position to his name is a feat that no one else in modern F3 has yet to repeat (notably, Victor Martins did win the 2022 F3 Championship without any poles, but this was his second year in the series). 

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The only driver with a perfect year in 2024

The consistency and skill that helped him win the F3 title in 2020 is also what helped Piastri become the only driver to complete every single race on the 2024 F1 calendar. Indeed, while retirements due to crashes or mechanical failures, DNSs and DNFs plagued every other driver on the grid at least once during the year, Piastri came out unscathed, resulting in a stellar fourth place finish in the World Drivers’ Championship. 

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His steady streak of finishes also helped ensure that McLaren took home the Constructors’ Title that year in a battle with Ferrari that came down to the very last race. It also helped that Piastri routinely claimed points during race weeks, finishing outside of the top 10 of a feature race just once during the whole year, in Miami.

But his streak of race finishes did not end there. In fact, he went on to rack up a massive 44-race completion run, starting from the Mexican Grand Prix of 2023 all the way to the Italian Grand Prix of 2025. This gives him one of the longest finishing streaks in the history of F1, second only to Lewis Hamilton himself, who has a run of 48 grands prix to his name. Piastri’s bid to topple that record was unfortunately stopped by a crash at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, but if there is anyone who can rise up to the occasion and make a play for the record again, it is the ever-unflappable Piastri himself.