Drive to Survive’ Star Oscar Piastri Dishes on Season 6

“We do our talking on the track,” quips Formula One driver Oscar Piastri to his teammate Lando Norris. It’s toward the end of his rookie season in motorsport’s most prestigious globe-trotting racing series. The comment, tucked away in the sixth season finale of Netflix’s wildly popular sports docuseries Formula One: Drive to Survive, provides a neat summary of Piastri’s personality and outlook on life: coolly, briefly observing situations with a wry, dry wit and steering clear of bullshit. At the same time, he maintains a constant awareness of the expectations placed on Formula One drivers, whose professional and personal dramas are the object of intense fan interest, speculation, and interpretation.

Drivers on other teams he’s too circumspect to name might squabble publicly, but that’s not the Piastri way. That kind of focus—on what matters, setting aside what doesn’t—has paid off over the years for the young phenomenon, who moved from his family home in Australia to boarding school in England so he could be closer to the heart of Formula One. A successful, solo continent-hopping career move at age 14? Piastri—who spoke with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed just before the debut of Drive to Survive’s sixth season this weekend—doesn’t brush away its significance. But he is philosophical about it, noting that while “those of us who are coming from outside of Europe often have a bit more to give up than the European drivers,” the experience made him think through “just how motivated you have to be before you make the decision [to pursue this career]. It forces you to grow up quite quickly.”

Piastri is the youngest driver on the Formula One grid—the first to have been born in the 21st century—and like all of his 19 colleagues across the sport’s 10 teams, he’s eager to push himself and his team’s eye-wateringly expensive high-performance race car to their speed and endurance limits. Piastri’s cool head on the race track has been essential to the success of his extraordinary first season as a Formula One driver, how he navigates the wild swings native to being an athlete in an elite, hyper-competitive sport, and what he hopes the 2024 racing season may hold.

Like any good reality series, Drive to Survive captures and shapes moments on- and off-track into gripping storylines. Each season of the show retrospectively tracks the events of the thrilling ups and often hilariously petty downs of the sport’s 10 teams and 20 drivers series across a season of races (formally known as Grand Prix) as they compete to win one or both of the championships at stake in Formula One. F1, As it’s more popularly known, holds two championships per season: one for the drivers, and another honoring the teams that design, build, and make improvements to the cars. The 2023 racing season posed an unusual problem for the show by being almost boring, thanks to the incredible performance of now three-time world champion…