Oscar Piastri has people perplexed. While other racing drivers around him celebrate with champagne “shoeys” or slap each other’s helmets in frustration, he often appears to coast in neutral, unmoved either way. Some have gone as far as to accuse him of being “emotionless”.

In his presence, that’s not at all what you see. He’s guarded, absolutely. Deliberately deadpan; a Fort Knox of facial expression, at times. If you can’t detect a lot of oomph, it’s mostly by design. He’s fiercely protective of certain things: his girlfriend, his family and friends. He’s not too keen on the pageantry and commedia dell’arte characters that – thanks to the pervasiveness of social media and the phenomenon that is Netflix’s Drive To Survive – have grown to exist alongside the actual rubber-on-tarmac moments of Formula 1.

He didn’t get into racing to clown for the cameras, though he’s happy for the more bombastic of the grid to try their hand at it. He just wants to get his head down, focus on his sport and not have to present as “interesting” by flaunting a string of model flames or diving into a body of water after a big win. “Emotionless” is an unfair label though and one that is slowly being relinquished. As he says, “I think people see differently now.”

Piastri, 25, has quickly become one of Formula 1’s most riveting colts. Not by selling a persona, but by being packed to the withers with talent. In his 2023 rookie season, the McLaren F1 Team driver clinched a Grand Prix victory in Hungary and then won the Qatar Sprint Race. With 97 points that year, he became one of the highest-scoring newbies of the modern era and the most successful since Lewis Hamilton’s debut (also for McLaren) in 2007.

As we head into 2026’s Miami race, he’s had nine grand prix victories, 27 podium finishes, six pole positions and nine fastest laps. His crash rate is also staggeringly low. In 2024, Piastri achieved a rare statistical milestone, by completing every single lap in a season, making him only the fourth driver in Formula 1 history to do so. In short, he is really, really good.

The complication, for drivers now, is that being really good is no longer the whole brief. Formula 1 has changed dramatically in the past decade. Since 2018, the sport has seen its global fanbase grow 63 per cent, to around 826 million people worldwide, with a particularly sharp incline among younger viewers and women. On social media, Formula 1 boasts more than 100 million followers across its owned channels, while clips and driver content on TikTok and YouTube are consumed in the billions. Spectators aren’t only turning up for Sunday’s victuals. Their appetite is insatiable all week long, leaving drivers competing nose to nose on track and also in the endless attention economy that now powers everything.

“As an F1 driver, you’re mostly racing driver, but also part-time actor, part-time spokesperson,” Piastri says. “There are a lot of other side jobs intertwined with it. The interviews, the shoots, the pieces in front of the camera, the fan-engagement activities. I got into this because I wanted to be the person in the race car driving. So [the rest of] it doesn’t always come the most naturally.”

He’s quick to catch any suggestion that he might be seeking sympathy though, smiling and adding with genuine good nature: “It’s a pretty tiny violin.” He knows, after all, that he is a rock star, and who could be mad at that?

Piastri probably belongs in an era when drivers were known principally as “helmets in a car”, as he puts it. In a culture that often mistakes volume for charisma, his constraint gets conflated with lack of personality.

“When I am in the car, calmness is a good thing to have,” he says. “But I definitely do have emotions.”

His composure extends beyond the cockpit. He has very little interest in contorting himself to meet other people’s expectations.

“I think generally everyone wants to be liked,” he says. “But you’re not going to be able to please everyone. So, I’m just going to be how I am, and if people like me, then they do. If they don’t, that’s fine.”

This is either unusual sagacity for his age, or the sign of a very healthy upbringing. Having spent quite a bit of time with him now, I suspect it’s both.

What’s wonderful is that his ability to tune out the noise has protected the raw enthusiasm he still has for the sport. “I started racing because I really enjoyed it,” Piastri muses on his origin story, which began unusually with remote-control car racing in Melbourne, aged nine, before he tried karting a year later.

And now? “The feeling of going to a race weekend; getting in the car and driving, is very similar to what it was 15 years ago.”

Beneath all the branding, schedules and flashbulbs remains a genuine obsessive. I needle him a little, that simply driving all day cannot be enough to fill his cup. He laughs.

“Driving the car in isolation is a very cool thing to do,” he says. “But it’s generally more fun if you’re beating people.” And there’s the star power: his hard-nosed competitive edge.

And yet, there is a wistfulness in the Aussie, when he thinks about the sliding-doors life running parallel to this, somewhere in the universe. For all that he knows he is living out his own fantasy – and is immensely grateful for it – he isn’t seduced for a second by the gaudier cliches of success. He’s not building towards a spread of McMansions and a 20-deep entourage. From his gilded enclosure, he casts an eye, tenderly, at versions of adulthood that involve a little more ordinary domesticity.

“Honestly, just doing the simple, mundane things in life,” he says of what he enjoys outside of the sport. “Whether it be watching TV or cooking dinner… Sometimes just spending some time at home, doing regular everyday things, you quickly start to learn that they’re not as regular as what you appreciated beforehand.”

He speaks with particular affection about watching his loved ones meander through milestones at a more recognisable pace. “My friends now are starting to move out of their family’s homes. I love going and seeing where they live now,” he says, “I kind of made that move 10 years ago.”

He pauses, then chuckles at the oddness of it. “Seeing their excitement or the nervousness moving out of home, it always makes me feel a bit funny, because I kind of have to go, ‘Oh yeah, what I’ve done in my life is not normal.’”

What actually fills his cup, it turns out, is proximity to his people. “It all comes down to human connection. That’s the biggest thing for me.”

This simplicity extends to his sense of style. “I’m probably the most basic fashion person ever,” Piastri says. “There are no lucky pants.”

Still, he proves as willing a sport about it as he is in other arenas. We ask him to ditch the fitted denim and step into softer layers, the sort of loose trousers that suggest a man who has brunch plans in Milan. He plays along.

“There is something I enjoy about putting on a nice outfit,” he says later. “I guess there is a small element of wanting to look good for myself, but it’s mainly for other people.” Which might be just about the most honest thing anyone has said of occasion dressing. “If the dress code was a T-shirt and shorts everywhere, though, I’d be more than happy with that.”

Piastri speaks about his future with the same prudence I’ve come to expect: “I know my career is not going to go on for eternity.” He’s in the nascent stages of thinking beyond it, taking interest in the “business side” and thinking about what he wants “to be able to make a difference in”.