Oscar Piastri may one day face the kind of Formula 1 decision that has destroyed more ambitions than it has fulfilled: stay inside a title-winning machine while living in the shadow of a superstar teammate, or walk away in search of leadership elsewhere and gamble everything on a team that may never truly deliver.
And according to two seasoned F1 insiders, history is littered with drivers who made the wrong choice.
As speculation swirls around Max Verstappen’s long-term future in F1, Piastri’s name has increasingly surfaced as a possible successor to the Dutchman at Red Bull.
On paper, the move sounds seductive: become the centerpiece of Red Bull’s next era alongside rising prospect Isack Hadjar.
But F1 veterans Rob Smedley and Otmar Szafnauer have issued a brutal reality check.
The trap drivers keep falling into
Speaking on the High Performance Racing podcast, Smedley dismantled the romantic idea that a driver can simply leave a dominant team environment and instantly build a championship legacy elsewhere.
His verdict was blunt – and rooted in years spent sitting on the pit walls at Ferrari and Williams, watching careers stall after bold exits
"If you're a driver in that team and you're struggling against your team-mate - I'm going back now to my Ferrari days - what's the option for you? Do you leave and go to a worse team that actually has no chance of winning the world championship, but you might be the better driver in that team?” questioned the Briton.
"I've seen that on many an occasion, I've seen drivers do that and I've never seen it work out well. I've never seen it where the driver's been happier."
That warning lands heavily in the context of Piastri’s current position at McLaren. The Australian is already embedded inside one of Formula 1’s strongest projects and remains central to the Woking outfit’s future through at least 2027.
Becoming number one isn’t enough
Former Aston Martin and Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer expanded on why so many of these moves unravel. The problem, he argued, is not simply becoming the lead driver – it is finding a team capable of climbing to the top while you are there.
And in modern Formula 1, dominance tends to calcify for years.
"Yeah, because there's two things that happen,” Szafnauer explained. “That team you're going to, you're saying isn't the best team, you've got to be the number one driver there, which you know you could be.
“But then that team also has to ascend to be the best team. And those two things are a bit more rare.
"Especially the team moving from third best to first, you know? Because usually there's periods of six, seven years of Mercedes or four or five years of Red Bull or whatever it was with Ferrari and Michael [Schumacher] - about ten.
"So in those ten years, if you're the number two at Ferrari and you say, 'You know what, I want to be the number one somewhere else,' you've got ten years of wherever you went is not the best team."
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That is the uncomfortable equation looming over any future Piastri decision.
If Verstappen walks away from Red Bull before 2028, the temptation for Piastri could become enormous.
A chance to inherit one of Formula 1’s most powerful seats, lead a new era, and escape the internal battle at McLaren would appeal to almost any driver on the grid.
But Smedley and Szafnauer’s message cuts through the fantasy with surgical precision: Formula 1 history suggests drivers who abandon elite machinery in pursuit of personal status often discover too late that being the star of the wrong team is still losing.
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