Oscar Piastri talks about why mental strength was more important in the 2025 title fight

Oscar Piastri has said that mental training might be more important than physical training.

In 2025 the McLaren driver was in the running for the championship in his third season of Formula 1. He said that having mental strength was very important during that tough year."It's a very important part of it and I think for me it's probably just as important if not more important than the physical training" the Australian driver said during a fan Q&A with Quad Lock.

From an engineering point of view, you need to look for 200ths of a second here and there to find a tenth in total. But if you're not in the right frame of mind or can't reach your full potential you could easily leave one of those tenths on the table because of how you did. So it's very important to make the most of that and it includes a lot of different things. It's very important to know how tired you are.

The 25 year old said that by the end of the season he was mentally exhausted after his first race in the championship in 2023 with McLaren. For example at the end of my first season in F1 I thought that some things weren't going very well. "And when the season was over I really didn't think about racing for a while," he said.I was completely worn out mentally because I was always trying to figure out how to make things better here and there.

And sometimes it's important to just take a step back. So that's been something this year: I think it's important to know where you put your energy and which fights you choose to fight and which ones you don't. It's clear that [2025] was a very stressful year for the whole season. And I think it was really important for me to try to deal with some of the problems that came up. I believe I did my best.

He said that he felt like he had gotten stronger mentally in 2025 but he also said that he could still get better. There are probably some things I can do better. I can handle things better in some ways. Talk to the people around you about how to make the world less stressful and how to reach your full potential.