Oscar Piastri won the F2 world championship in 2021 but won't be part of the Formula 1 grid for the upcoming 2022 season.
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Australian racing driver Oscar Piastri is happy with his role as Alpine’s test driver for 2022, saying he prefers that to racing in another series.
Piastri won the F2 world championship in 2021 quite comfortably. But he won’t be part of the Formula 1 grid for the upcoming 2022 season.
As a rule, the driver who wins the F2 title will not defend it the following year. And given the pace he showed in 2021, many expected him to get a seat for 2022.
Instead it is his title rival Guanyou Zhou who will be in F1 with Alfa Romeo; thanks in no small part to significant sponsorship money.
“I’ll be pretty busy despite not doing that much driving – we are putting together a big testing programme,” he told Auto Action.
“It’ll be quite a lot of days considering it’s F1 testing, and it’s not particularly cheap.
“It’s going to be a good number of days – I’ll be doing some driving in some capacity.
“Probably not any race driving, but the way I’m looking at it, I want to prepare for F1 and for me, there’s not really much relevance in racing anything other than F1.
“I think it’s much more valuable to be doing test days in an F1 car, than then to be racing something else and trying to learn a new trade.”
Many fans would have preferred Piastri to be at Alfa Romeo over Zhou. However, that was never an option – simply because the Swiss-Italian team did not even speak to Piastri.
What’s more, the Aussie’s preference was always to stay loyal to Alpine and pin his hopes on a 2023 seat.
“Whilst it would have been amazing if I could have been in F1 this year, realistically, I’m not sure it would have been the right move,” he said.
“Even from the outset, I didn’t have any talks with Alfa. I don’t know if my management did, but I don’t think so.
“I will never have to worry about how that situation would have played out. But there was obviously a lot of other candidates for that seat, but also I wanted to stay loyal to Alpine as well.”
As for whether he’ll be on the grid on 2023, Piastri believes it’s too early for any such talks. But he will be doing everything he can to put himself on the grid.
“To be honest I don’t know. It’s very early to start thinking about those kind of situations. I think we’ll get a much better read on that once the season’s begun.
“I’ve made it clear, I want to be on the grid next year, and I feel like I deserve to be. I’m working towards doing everything I can to do that.”
