The Australian is entering an elite club: in F1 history, only Juan Pablo Montoya and Carlos Reutemann have achieved 8 consecutive podiums without ever winning a title.
The championship leader
Oscar Piastri is without a doubt the man of the moment in Formula 1. The Australian truly seems to be the new star of the sport: he has already won five out of nine Grands Prix this year, leads the championship by 10 points over his teammate Lando Norris, and is riding a streak of eight consecutive podium finishes. These are numbers McLaren hasn’t seen since the days of Lewis Hamilton, when the Woking-based team was a benchmark in the championship.
Now, after many difficult seasons, that era appears to have returned. While numbers don’t tell the whole story, they help provide context and might even bring a smile to Piastri’s face. His streak of eight consecutive top-3 finishes – from the Chinese Grand Prix to the Spanish Grand Prix so far – carries special significance: only 25 times in the entire history of F1 has a driver managed to reach the podium in at least eight consecutive races, whether in a single season or spanning two seasons.
Champion-level numbers
If Oscar Piastri achieves the same result in Canada at the next Grand Prix, he will reach nine and enter a very exclusive group: in all of F1 history, only drivers who went on to become world champions have reached nine consecutive podiums, and in almost all cases, the title was won in the same season or in one of the two seasons during which the streak took place (for those who spread it across two years).
Currently, with eight podiums in a row, Oscar Piastri shares this milestone with Juan Pablo Montoya and Carlos Reutemann as the only three drivers to achieve it without ever having won a world title. But the Australian’s goal is to “fix” that detail as soon as possible. The feeling is that if he continues like this, it will be impossible for any of his rivals to stop him.
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