Oscar Piastri has quickly established himself as a top driver in Formula 1, but the McLaren driver has admitted that reaching the championship was never his primary objective.
Instead, the Australian maintained a realistic approach to his early career, deliberately separating his dream of driving in F1 from his more grounded ambitions.
Speaking about his journey through the feeder series during an appearance on the High Performance podcast, Piastri explained that if he had been asked at the age of 14 whether he would ever become an F1 driver or a champion, he would have said “probably no”.
“I was realistic, and until I got to F2, I always split my dream and my goal. My dream was always to be an F1 driver, but my goal was always to just be a professional racing driver,” Piastri said.
“I just wanted to race cars for a living. I didn’t really mind if it was an F1 car, a supercar in Australia, GT cars, IndyCar even. Although with age I’m not so sure I’d go race in IndyCar now, but I wanted to be a professional racing driver, and I was very realistic that my chances of getting to F1 were incredibly small.
“So I’d accepted that from a young age, but I also thought, even if I don’t make it to F1, I’m just going to get as far as I can up the junior ladder. And if I don’t make it, then hopefully there’s an opportunity that comes from racing in F3 or F2.
“I didn’t really let myself dare to turn that dream into a goal until I got to F2 and started to fight for the championship, and even then, it was more a logical step of going, ‘OK, well, the next thing, if this goes well, say if I win this year, the only step left is F1’.
Oscar Piastri, McLaren
Photo by: Steven Tee / LAT Images via Getty Images
“Rather than going like, ‘I’m in F2 now. OK, now I really want to get to F1.’ It was, ‘OK, well, things are still going well in the junior ranks, so the next step is F1, and that’s a pretty cool place to land.'”
He added: “So, I was very realistic early on the chances of making it happen were going to be small, but I guess the saying, ‘Well, somebody’s got to do it’, is very much true. And I think when you’re a kid, it seems very far away. And that feeling of someone does have to fill those seats on the grid, feels incredibly distant and hard to achieve, but as you get a little bit closer you go, ‘OK, I can actually be one of the people to do this.'”
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