"Yeah, it was tough" - Oscar Piastri on the frustration of spending a year as the Alpine reserve driver

Oscar Piastri recently disclosed that the year he spent as a reserve driver at Alpine after winning the F2 championship was 'tough to take'.

Piastri was riding a wave of momentum after winning multiple championships on the trot. In 2021, the Australian dominated the Formula 2 championship, winning the title. However, with Alpine already having Esteban Ocon and Fernando Alonso on the team, there was no place for Piasstri, which meant he had to spend a season on the sidelines.

Speaking on the Beyond the Grid podcast, Oscar Piastri said,

"Yeah, it was tough. Any racing driver wants to be racing as much as they can and being in that position, where the rules, because I won F2, said that I couldn't repeat F2, I quite literally had no more junior categories to race. That was a nice problem to have in one way. But still a problem, nonetheless. I found out more or less halfway through my F2 season that I wouldn't be making the step up to F1 the next year no matter what I did."

He added:

"It was tough to take. Four rounds into the season, I’d just taken my first pole and the championship lead. So, to then find out I'm not going to be making up the jump to F1 next year, regardless of what I do from now, it hurt."

Oscar Piastri ended up learning a lot from Ocon and Alonso

Even though Oscar Piastri couldn't race in 2022, he still ended up learning a lot from Esteban Ocon and Fernando Alonso. He said:

"Quite a lot. In some ways more than I ever intended. I took the mindset of, ‘I can't race this year, but I can try and learn all the sort of background stuff that you don't see on TV in F1’. Simple stuff like how busy the schedule is for the drivers. Melbourne last year was a perfect example for me, and I was pretty tired after that weekend without even driving."

He added:

"Just getting into that schedule, getting into the routine, seeing what happens, listening to all the debriefs and trying to learn as much as I could from Fernando and Esteban."

Oscar Piastri has since moved to McLaren and scored his first career points in the 2023 F1 Australian GP.