Two of Formula 1's most experienced pit-wall figures have publicly cautioned Oscar Piastri against entertaining any move from McLaren to Red Bull, with the Australian's name persistently linked to a long-term replacement seat should Max Verstappen leave for Mercedes or step away from the sport.
The pressure on Piastri's situation has only grown in the opening five rounds of the season. He is third in the championship, twenty-something points behind teammate Lando Norris and another stretch behind runaway leader Kimi Antonelli at Mercedes. Mark Webber, his manager, is reported to be quietly unhappy with how the intra-team battle has been refereed at McLaren, and Red Bull's interest in a 2027 reset around either Piastri or Lando Norris is one of the more openly discussed paddock storylines.
Former Ferrari and Williams engineer Rob Smedley, now a senior figure in F1's broadcast and consultancy world, took the strategic view in a Sky panel discussion and was unsparing about the history of similar moves.
"If you're a driver in that team and you're struggling against your team-mate... Do you leave and go to a worse team that actually has no chance of winning the world championship?" Smedley said.
"I've seen that on many an occasion. I've never seen it work out well."
The roll-call of cautionary tales is long. Daniel Ricciardo's mid-career jump from Red Bull to Renault and then McLaren stalled his title hopes and shortened his peak. Sebastian Vettel's swap of Red Bull dominance for Ferrari hope produced moments of brilliance but no championship. Fernando Alonso's various political departures cost him at least one title window. The pattern is consistent: a driver in a winning car who chases a perceived political fix usually ends up trapped in a developing one.
Former Aston Martin and Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer made the same case from the boardroom side, arguing that the two conditions a driver needs to align — being unequivocally the lead at the new team and that team rising to genuine title contention — almost never line up.
"That team you're going to... you've got to be the number one driver there," Szafnauer said. "But then that team also has to ascend to be the best team. And those two things are a bit more rare."
For Piastri the calculus is particularly sharp. McLaren has, by Andrea Stella's own admission, the strongest chassis on the 2026 grid, even if its Mercedes-derived power unit is no longer the benchmark it was. Red Bull's car has improved in the wake of the Honda-replacement Ford-powered DM01 update, but the team's political turbulence — from the Christian Horner-era fallout through to Adrian Newey's departure for Aston Martin — is the kind of background noise Piastri has so far been insulated from at Woking.
McLaren has been pointed in its own response. CEO Zak Brown has publicly reiterated that he is "happy with what I've got" and that no contractual escape route is realistically open to Piastri before the end of 2027. Mark Webber, asked about the swirl at Miami, declined to engage beyond confirming Piastri's contract status.
What Smedley and Szafnauer are giving Piastri's camp, in effect, is a public reminder that the most expensive decision in a driver's career is rarely the obvious one. The risk is not that Red Bull cannot win again. It is that, by the time it does, the seat Piastri left behind may be the one his rivals were measuring.
Source: f1i.com