Rookie Oscar Piastri has kicked his preparations for his first season in Formula 1 up a level, after completing a private test at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. McLaren’s new driver was behind the wheel of the Woking-based team’s successful 2021 challenger on Thursday, with team-mate Lando Norris having completed some laps himself on Wednesday. 2023
MoreMcLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown has revealed that Oscar Piastri’s first target at the Woking-based team is to “get any of that race rustiness off him”, with the Australian driver having not raced a car since the 2021 Formula 2 season finale. McLaren’s newest signing spent the entirety of last season on the bench, with
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McLaren’s relationship with Daniel Ricciardo was extremely positive, with both sides exhausting every option in an attempt to make their time together as successful as possible. Unfortunately, the Australian was unable to find his true form with the team and was comprehensively beating in the championship by McLaren’s young star Lando Norris. The team were
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Daniel Ricciardo was unfortunately a victim of the MCL36’s unique driving style requirements, with the car requiring a specific style of driver to extract the maximum performance. The car had a much stronger rear end than front, meaning that the McLaren drivers often had to take a softer approach to corners that the other teams.
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2022 was another successful year for young McLaren star Lando Norris, with the 23-year-old finishing as the best of the rest driver and being the only man outside of the top three teams to score a podium. One thing that does elude the Brit however is his first race win, with Norris being forced to
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McLaren team principal Andrea Stella believes rookie driver Oscar Piastri has “enough talent” to learn from the “references” laid out by team-mate Lando Norris, to get an understanding of the team’s 2023 challenger. Norris will certainly be the Woking-based team’s number one driver for at least the start of the upcoming season, with Piastri’s initial
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Having come through the Alpine driver academy and being the 2021 Formula 2 champion, it looked as if the French team had the perfect replacement for the ageing Fernando Alonso waiting in the wings. The team’s initial plan was to loan Piastri to Williams to gain experience until Alonso’s contract expired, however when the Spaniard
MoreEx-Formula 1 driver Mark Webber has warned fellow Australian Daniel Ricciardo that his one-year sabbatical will likely “feel longer” than a year for him, but that it could actually be something that works in the 33-year-old’s favour. Ricciardo finds himself on the bench for 2023 after opting to take a year out of F1 to
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Daniel Ricciardo’s spell with McLaren did not go anywhere near as well as he had planned, as the Australian was destroyed by his teammate Lando Norris across both of their seasons racing together. After both team and driver tried everything the possibly could to make the relationship work, McLaren took the difficult decision to part
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Oscar Piastri’s move to McLaren was certainly not a simple one, as his former employers Alpine clearly believed that their contract with the Australian tied him down to racing for the team in 2023. The French team were rocked when their academy driver publicly rejected their race seat in favour of replacing Daniel Ricciardo at
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