Nicole Piastri isn’t expecting to see much of her son during the Australian Grand Prix this weekend.
“He came to lunch on Monday and that’s about it,” she says of Formula 1 driver Oscar Piastri, who placed third in the driver’s championship last year.
It’s not that Nicole and the McLaren driver aren’t close. It’s just that despite the race being held in his home town, Oscar will stay with his team.
“He’s very closely guarded this weekend. Not even his mum can get near him,” Nicole says of the 24-year-old who is now aiming to become the first Australian since Alan Jones in 1980 to claim the world championship.
Speaking at the Victorian Chamber of Commerce breakfast on Thursday morning, Nicole told the crowd that growing up in the bayside suburb of Brighton, her son was into cars from a very young age, starting with radio-controlled racing, then go-karting, and moving on to race cars.
“There was no stopping it, I tried really hard,” Nicole says. “Both grandparents are mechanics and his dad is into cars and has a car tuning business, so it was happening.”
She still remembers the day when her then-husband, Chris Piastri, phoned to let her know he had signed up their son to move to Europe and pursue his F1 dream.
“I’ve emailed you a list of the stuff he needs. We’ll be home in a week, he can grab all the stuff, say his goodbyes and drop him off, and we’re good to go,” she recalled Chris told her.
“So they came home, and it may be one of the reasons we are no longer married,” Nicole says.
Being so far away from her son when he was so young was difficult. One of the most sobering times occurred when Oscar was 16, and racing in the F4 in the UK, accompanied by Chris.
Nicole was in Phillip Island with the couple’s three daughters – Hattie, Edie and Mae – and had stayed up late to watch the race in the middle of the night when she received a text from Chris saying, “look, there’s been an incident”.
“As soon as I Googled it, footage came up from Billy’s [Monger] camera of him going into the back at full speed, into the back of the stationary car on the track that he didn’t see because of the rain. And the footage was so disturbing that I vomited.”
The disastrous crash saw Monger ultimately have both of his legs amputated, and after being told the driver had been crying out for his mother as he was cut out of his car, Nicole flew to the UK to be with Oscar for his next race.
But when she picked him up from boarding school and asked her son how he felt about racing on the weekend, she says she quickly realised he was largely unaffected by what had happened.
“I’m in the car every second weekend,” she says he told her. “And so I thought it’s best for me not to put that anxiety into his head.”
Since then, Nicole has set out a plan for each of Oscar’s races.
“I don’t dwell on it, but every single race I know how I would get to him as quickly as possible if I need to,” she says.
When Oscar returned home to Melbourne to film segments for the popular Netflix series Drive to Survive, he gave his mother less than a day’s notice that the crew wanted to film a “normal breakfast” at their home.
“Don’t do anything fancy,” he told her. “They’re just filming an average day in our household.”
Nicole laughed and told Oscar he had been gone for too long.
“Let me tell you what an average day is like. It’s me screaming like a banshee at the girls to get ready for school and them storming down the stairs, grabbing something highly inappropriate for breakfast, walking out the door, and basically giving me the bird,” she told him. “You want the world to see that? Let’s go.”
In preparation, Nicole stayed up all night getting the house ready, buying fresh flowers and pastries, and bribing Oscar’s sisters to behave. But in the end, the footage was cut.
“Ironically, they replaced our footage with [Otmar] Szafnauer, who was high up in [F1 team] Alpine, walking his dog and picking up dog turds,” she says. “Which I thought was highly appropriate. I wasn’t unhappy about the whole thing.”
When asked by Lune Croissanterie founder and former F1 engineer Kate Reid whether her son’s rise to fame and fortune had changed him, Nicole was adamant it hasn’t.
She recalled Oscar FaceTiming her from bed one day, leaning on a tapestry. When she asked him where he was, he said he was staying at the Royal Palace in Bahrain.
“Oh my god get your head off that tapestry, that would be worth a squillion dollars,” Nicole told him.
“I don’t think so,” Oscar replied. “It looks pretty old and crappy.”
When he turned the phone camera on the rest of the room, Nicole said it looked as if he had picked up his clothes, thrown them in the air and let them fall everywhere.
“I’m talking boxer shorts on lampshades,” Nicole said. “I told him, ‘pick up your clothes!’”
Even with his meteoric success on the track, Nicole says she is still not really a fan of Formula 1.
“I don’t love it as a sport,” she said. “I would have much rathered he be a golfer or a tennis player, but he loves it.”
When Nicole was reminded that she probably could have stopped him moving overseas when he was a teenager if she had wanted to, she conceded, “I could have. But at the end of the day, it was let him go, and my heart gets broken, or make him stay, and his heart gets broken. I don’t know a mother who would choose the latter.”
As far as she’s concerned, her child is pursuing his dream, so she is happy to support it.
Even if it means she won’t get to see him much this weekend.
Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.
From our partners
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
