Oscar Piastri Age 2026: How Old Is the McLaren Star?

Last updated: 6 November 2026 | By Nathan Cole

Oscar Piastri is 25 years old in 2026. He was born on 6 April 2001 in Melbourne, Australia, and turned 25 on 6 April 2026. He is in his fourth season of Formula 1, driving for McLaren, and he has already won nine Grands Prix, stood on the podium 27 times, and lost a world championship to his own teammate by a margin that still stings.

The age matters because the speed of the rise is the story. Piastri won the Formula Renault Eurocup in 2019, the Formula 3 title as a rookie in 2020, and the Formula 2 title as a rookie in 2021 — three championships in three years, each at the first attempt. He spent 2022 on the sidelines in a contract fight, debuted in 2023, won his first Grand Prix in 2024, and in 2025 won seven races and finished third in the championship with 410 points. At 25, he is already one of the best-paid drivers on the grid, with a contract running to the end of 2028 and a net worth estimated between 40 and 55 million dollars. This profile answers the age question first, then follows the whole arc: the Melbourne childhood, the move to England at fourteen, the junior titles, the Alpine dispute, the McLaren years, the money, and the private life he guards closely.

Every figure below is attributed to the outlet that reported it. Nothing here is invented, and nothing is copied from a competitor’s telling of the same life.

How Old Is Oscar Piastri?

Oscar Piastri is 25 years old. He was born Oscar Jack Piastri on 6 April 2001 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, which makes him 25 years, 7 months old in November 2026. His birthday falls early in the Formula 1 season — the Australian Grand Prix, his home race, usually runs within days of it — so the paddock gets a yearly reminder of how young he still is.

Twenty-five is young for a driver with his record, and old enough for the expectations to have changed. A 23-year-old rookie gets patience. A 25-year-old with nine wins, a 410-point season and a contract to 2028 gets judged on championships. The rest of this profile is the story of how he got to that point so fast — and what the next three years are supposed to deliver.

The Melbourne Beginning: Remote-Control Cars and Karting

Piastri was born and raised in Melbourne, in the suburb of Brighton, about eleven kilometres south-east of the city centre. His father, Chris Piastri, is the founder and owner of HP Tuners, an automotive software company; his mother, Nicole (née MacFadyen), raised him alongside his three younger sisters — Hattie, Edie and Mae. The heritage is mixed: Italian, Yugoslavian and Chinese from his father, Scottish and Irish from his mother.

Racing started small and literal. Piastri began racing competitively at nine, with remote-controlled cars, winning the secondary class of the national championship. He moved into karting in 2011, aged ten, at the Oakleigh Go Kart Racing Club in Clayton South, under the guidance of two-time Australian champion James Sera. His father was his kart mechanic in those early years and HP Tuners sponsored the junior career — a backing Wikipedia puts at up to 6.5 million Australian dollars across the junior formulae.

The karting years built the reputation that carried him to Europe: a third place in the Australian Kart Championship in 2015, then the decision that separates the serious from the hopeful. In 2016, aged fourteen, he moved to Hertford, England, to race internationally. His father came with him and returned to Melbourne six months later, leaving a fourteen-year-old to finish school and chase a Formula 1 seat on his own. He attended Haileybury College, in Australia and then in the UK, and it was there he met Lily Zneimer — the girlfriend he still has, eight years later.

Junior Formulae: Three Titles in Three Years

The junior career is the cleanest part of the Piastri story, because the results leave no room for argument. He won the Formula Renault Eurocup in 2019. He won the FIA Formula 3 championship in 2020, as a rookie. He won the FIA Formula 2 championship in 2021, as a rookie. Three titles in three years, the last two at the first attempt, against fields full of drivers with more experience and bigger budgets.

Back-to-back rookie titles in F3 and F2 are rare. The usual path is a learning year, then a title year; Piastri skipped the learning year twice. That is why the paddock was already talking about him as a future world champion before he had driven a Formula 1 car — and why what happened next, the year with no seat at all, was so strange.

The Alpine Dispute and the McLaren Arrival

Piastri won the F2 title in 2021 and had nowhere to go. There was no Formula 1 seat for 2022, so he spent the year as Alpine’s reserve driver — a champion, watching. In August 2022 Alpine announced him as a race driver for 2023. Piastri publicly refused, posting that he had not signed and would not be driving for the team. The dispute went to the FIA’s Contract Recognition Board, which ruled that his McLaren contract was the only valid one.

He debuted for McLaren in Bahrain in 2023. The rookie salary, by the reporting of the time, was around 3 million dollars — modest next to teammate Lando Norris, who was reportedly earning around 30 million dollars a year. The gap said everything about where the two drivers stood in 2023. Three years later, the gap is gone.

Formula 1 Debut: The 2023 Rookie Season

Piastri was 21 when he lined up on the Bahrain grid in March 2023, and 22 by the end of his rookie season. The year was a learning curve with visible results: he scored points, took his first podium, and finished the season as a driver McLaren clearly intended to build around. In September 2023, late in his rookie season, McLaren announced a three-year contract covering 2024 to the end of 2026, with his base pay rising from 5 million to 10 million and then 13 million dollars across the deal — 28 million dollars in total, according to F1Salaries’ reconstruction.

The extension mattered more than the money. It said McLaren had stopped treating him as a prospect and started treating him as a pillar. The wins that followed proved the judgement.

First Win: Hungary 2024

Piastri’s first Grand Prix victory came in Hungary in 2024, in his second season. It was the win that turned the junior titles into a Formula 1 record, and the season that followed it — his third — was the one that made him a championship contender. By April 2026, MR PORTER’s profile of him counted nine Grand Prix victories, 27 podium finishes, six pole positions and nine fastest laps. He was 25, and he had been winning Grands Prix for less than two years.

The Hungary win also set the pattern of his McLaren career: a driver who is fast, calm and hard to rattle, paired with a teammate — Norris — who is equally fast and considerably more experienced. The pairing has produced one of the strongest driver line-ups on the grid, and one of the tensest, because both men now believe they can win the championship, and only one of them can.

2025: Seven Wins and a Title Lost to Norris

The 2025 season was Piastri’s best and his most painful. He won seven Grands Prix, took 16 podiums, and finished the championship third on 410 points, according to McLaren’s own season record. He led the championship for long stretches and dominated the middle of the season. Then the title went to his teammate. Christian Horner, the former Red Bull team principal, called the loss “hurtful” and pointed out how young Piastri still is — “you forget the guy’s only done a couple of seasons in Formula One” — which is both a compliment and a reminder of how much time he has.

The money followed the results. Forbes, in its 2025 list of Formula 1’s highest-paid drivers, estimated Piastri earned 37.5 million dollars on track in 2025 — fourth on the grid — made up of a 10-million-dollar salary and 27.5 million dollars in performance bonuses. Sportico put his total 2025 earnings at roughly 38 million dollars (35 million in salary and bonuses, 3 million in endorsements) and ranked him 96th among the world’s highest-paid athletes — his first appearance on the list, and one of only four Formula 1 drivers on it. The full dated breakdown of the fortune is covered in Oscar Piastri’s net worth profile on this site.

The 2026 Season So Far

The 2026 season has been harder. As of the standings checked in November 2026, Piastri sits seventh in the championship with 144 points, no wins and two podiums. The car has not been the title-winning machine of 2025, and the results show it. MotorBiscuit’s season tracker lists the same numbers: seventh, 144 points, best finish second.

A winless season at 25 does not define a career — champions have had worse years — but it changes the conversation. The question is no longer whether Piastri can win races; nine wins answered that. The question is whether the 2026 car and the 2027 regulations give him the machinery to fight for the title his 2025 season promised. The contract, signed in March 2025, runs through the end of 2028, so he has time. The paddock’s patience, though, is shorter than a contract.

The Contract and the Salary

Piastri’s pay is one of the most argued-over numbers in Formula 1, because the published figures disagree by a factor of two. The disagreement is not sloppiness — it is different outlets measuring different things. The table below separates them.

The firmest facts are the contract dates. McLaren announced a multi-year extension on 11 March 2025, giving no figures; reports say it runs to the end of 2028, adding 2027 and 2028 to the deal that already covered 2024 to 2026. The base salary has risen every year since his debut — from about 3 million dollars as a rookie in 2023, to 5 million, to 10 million, to 13 million in 2026 on F1Salaries’ reconstruction — and the bonus structure is where the real money sits: Forbes’ 27.5 million dollars of 2025 bonuses is more than double the salary, and it was earned by winning seven races. A driver who wins gets paid like a winner. A driver who does not, does not.

Net Worth: What the Estimates Say

Piastri’s net worth is estimated between 40 and 55 million dollars as of mid-2026, on SureBets’ editorial range, which weighs the published estimates against his reported salary and deducts tax, fees and spending. Celebrity Net Worth prints 50 million dollars, updated in December 2025. The Financial Review’s 2025 Young Rich List put him at number 56 with 122 million Australian dollars — roughly 80 million US dollars at late-2025 exchange rates — the highest of the published figures, and the one most likely to count the full value of the contract rather than money already banked.

The spread is honest, because the career is short. Piastri has had three full seasons of Formula 1 pay, one of them at rookie money. The fortune is growing fast — the 2025 season alone was worth 37.5 million dollars on track, by Forbes’ count — and the 2028 contract guarantees the growth continues. The full dated breakdown, estimate by estimate, is in Oscar Piastri’s net worth profile on this site.

Height, Fitness and the Physical Side

Piastri stands 178 centimetres tall — 5 feet 10 inches — and weighs about 68 kilograms (150 pounds). He is slightly taller than his teammate Norris, who is 1.77 metres, and a little above average height for a Formula 1 driver, where a shorter frame is usually preferred because it fits the cockpit better and keeps the car’s centre of gravity low. The difference is small, and his results say it has not held him back.

The physical demands of the job are the part of the age story people miss. A Formula 1 driver pulls several times his own body weight in braking and cornering, lap after lap, in a cockpit that reaches 50 degrees Celsius. Piastri’s fitness work — neck strength, core stability, heat training — is the unglamorous half of the nine wins, and it is the half that gets harder as a driver ages. At 25, he is at the age where the body is at its peak and the experience is catching up. That overlap is the window every driver chases, and it is open now.

Personal Life: Lily Zneimer and the Private Side

Piastri keeps his private life private, and the one relationship the public knows about has been there since school. He has been in a relationship with Lily Zneimer, an engineering graduate, since 2018 — they met at Haileybury College’s sixth form in England, where he was studying while racing in Europe. She is not a public figure, the couple makes few public appearances together, and Piastri rarely discusses the relationship. The contrast with the rest of the grid is deliberate: the racing is public, the life is not.

The family is part of the same picture. His father, Chris, was his kart mechanic and the sponsor who funded the junior career; his mother, Nicole, held the family together in Brighton while her son moved to England at fourteen; his three younger sisters — Hattie, Edie and Mae — grew up watching their brother leave home to chase a seat. The support was practical as well as emotional: without HP Tuners’ backing, the junior titles do not happen, and without the junior titles, there is no McLaren contract.

What 25 Looks Like in Modern Formula 1

Piastri’s age puts him in the middle of the grid’s new generation — drivers who reached Formula 1 in their early twenties after winning junior titles, rather than spending years as test drivers. What sets him apart is not the age but the efficiency: three junior championships in three years, a rookie Formula 1 season at 21, a first win at 23, a title fight at 24. The timeline has no wasted years in it except 2022, the season he spent as a reserve with no seat — and even that year ended with a contract dispute he won.

The comparison that will define the next three years is the one inside his own garage. Norris, his teammate, took the 2025 title that Piastri’s seven wins had put within reach, and Lando Norris’ net worth profile on this site shows how far ahead the senior driver still sits financially. Piastri is 25, under contract to 2028, and already one of the four best-paid drivers on the grid. The next step is the one only a championship delivers: the number one on the car, and the pay that follows it.

What’s Next: The 2027–2028 Contract Years

The extension Piastri signed in March 2025 runs through the end of 2028, which means the next two seasons are already decided: McLaren, car number 81, and a salary that rises with results. The 2027 regulation changes will reset the competitive order, and a driver who has already proved he can win seven races in a season does not need to prove he belongs — he needs a car that lets him prove he can win a championship.

He will be 27 when the contract ends. If the title comes before then, the next negotiation starts from a position of strength, and the salary figures that currently range from 13 to 26 million dollars will look like the early numbers they are. If it does not, the questions will start — about the team, the car, and the driver. At 25, with nine wins and a 410-point season behind him, he has earned the right to be judged on the next three years, not the last one.

For the money behind the age — the dated estimates, the contract figures, and why the salary trackers disagree — read Oscar Piastri’s net worth profile on this site. For the teammate who took the 2025 title, Lando Norris’ net worth is covered in full.

Frequently Asked Questions About Oscar Piastri’s Age

Sources & Reporting

This age profile was reported from the following sources, all checked in November 2026: Sportradar and Autosport for the date of birth (6 April 2001) and the current age of 25; Motorsport Australia (2 March 2026) and Wikipedia (Oscar Piastri) for the Melbourne upbringing, the Brighton suburb, the parents Chris and Nicole Piastri, the three younger sisters Hattie, Edie and Mae, the remote-controlled racing from age nine, the karting start in 2011, the move to England at fourteen, the Haileybury College schooling, the HP Tuners sponsorship of up to A$6.5 million, the junior titles (Formula Renault Eurocup 2019, Formula 3 2020 and Formula 2 2021, both as a rookie), the 2022 Alpine dispute and the Contract Recognition Board ruling, and the relationship with Lily Zneimer since 2018; MR PORTER (30 April 2026) for the nine Grand Prix wins, 27 podiums, six poles and nine fastest laps; MotorBiscuit for the 2026 season standings (7th, 144 points, 0 wins, 2 podiums); F1Headline (16 October 2026) for the 2025 season summary and the age as of October 2026; Forbes, via CelebrityFees (23 October 2026), for the 2025 earnings of $37.5 million ($10 million salary plus $27.5 million in bonuses), the 410-point championship finish and the third-place result; Sportskeeda for Christian Horner’s comments on the 2025 title loss to Lando Norris; F1Chronicle for the $20 million base salary plus up to $10 million in bonuses and the March 2025 extension through 2028; F1Salaries (updated 2 November 2026) for the $13 million 2026 base salary and the year-by-year pay progression from the $3 million rookie deal; CelebrityFees and SureBets (28 July 2026) for the net-worth range of $40–55 million; Celebrity Net Worth (updated 8 December 2025) for the $50 million net-worth estimate; Sportico, via F1Chronicle, for the roughly $38 million total 2025 earnings and the 96th-place ranking among the world’s highest-paid athletes; TheCityCeleb and F1Oversteer for the 178 cm height, the 68 kg weight and the family details; and this site’s own Oscar Piastri net worth profile and Lando Norris net worth profile for the cross-linked figures. Net worth and salary figures are estimates: Piastri has never disclosed his pay, McLaren does not publish driver salaries, and no public filing reveals his assets or income. Where sources disagree, this article publishes the range and names the outlet behind each figure. Corrections: figures are updated when new reporting emerges — contact us via the About page if you spot an error.