The winter break offered Oscar Piastri a chance to reflect on the end of the 2025 season. He arrived in Sakhir with a refreshed team, at least in terms of on-track support, while Mark Webber’s role has been scaled back.
Piastri enters the Bahrain paddock this season with two new figures (new to Formula 1) who will support him throughout the year. The winter period was an opportunity to analyze the challenging end of the 2025 World Championship and identify key issues, leading the Australian driver to make changes to his personal team for race weekends.
His management remains in the hands of Mark Webber and Ann Neal, a partnership dating back to the start of his Formula 1 career. However, this season Webber will no longer play his previous on-track role, focusing instead on commercial aspects alongside his wife, Ann.
At Oscar Piastri’s side is now Pedro Matos, his race engineer from Prema in 2021, the season in which he won the Formula 2 title as a rookie. Matos had also supported Oscar during his single-seater debut in the 2017 British Formula 4 Championship.
Alongside the 33-year-old Portuguese engineer, Oscar Piastri will continue to work with Emma Murray, his mental coach since the early days of his motorsport career. Murray, an Australian coach with experience supporting athletes in other sports, will be more present on track this year.
This marks a new phase for Piastri, who is determined to restore the harmony that defined the first half of last season. Bringing in Matos, a pure technical expert with a different profile than Webber, allows for more focused, direct support, free from additional layers of management.
Some interpret Oscar Piastri’s choices as confirmation that last autumn’s drop in performance was not the team’s fault. In this context, Matos will serve as an independent voice, acting as a key reference point for Oscar, especially in critical moments, taking over some of the responsibilities previously held by Webber. At McLaren, the staff supporting the Australian remains unchanged and has been confirmed as a whole.
As the 2026 season gets underway, Oscar Piastri’s proactive approach to his personal development highlights his maturity as a driver. By surrounding himself with technical and mental specialists who have seen him through his most successful junior categories, the Australian is clearly aiming to maximize his potential within the McLaren setup and solidify his place as a frontrunner in the new era of Formula 1.
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