{"id":476465,"date":"2026-02-13T03:19:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T03:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/476465\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T03:19:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T03:19:11","slug":"mark-webber-steps-back-from-oscar-piastri-role-mclaren-f1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/476465\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Webber steps back from Oscar Piastri role, McLaren F1"},"content":{"rendered":"

A massive change has been made to Oscar Piastri<\/a>‘s innermost circle ahead of the 2026 F1<\/a> season.<\/p>\n

Mark Webber<\/a>, who alongside wife Ann Neal has managed Piastri throughout his career, has stepped back from his hands-on trackside role with the young Aussie.<\/p>\n

But Piastri won’t be without expertise – he has brought in Pedro Matos, who was his race engineer for his F2 title-winning season in 2021, in what is basically a straight swap.<\/p>\n

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Webber has balanced his trackside role with Piastri with semi-regular punditry with Channel 4 in the UK.<\/p>\n

He also has several other commercial interests within the paddock.<\/p>\n

\"ABU<\/p>\n

Mark Webber has taken a step back from his trackside role with Oscar Piastri.\u00a0LAT Images<\/p>\n

PlanetF1 reports Webber will focus solely on Piastri’s commercial and contractual matters in 2026.<\/p>\n

Piastri will be hoping Matos’ addition will give him a boost as he heads into his fourth full F1 season.<\/p>\n

He won seven grands prix last year, and led the championship by 34 points after the Dutch Grand Prix, before a horror dip in form saw him crash three times and finish on the podium just three times in the final nine races.<\/p>\n

He finished third in the championship, 13 points behind his victorious teammate.<\/p>\n

The F1 circus is currently in Bahrain for pre-season testing. Piastri was at the wheel of his new McLaren on Wednesday night, before handing the car over to teammate Lando Norris for Thursday.<\/p>\n

\"Oscar<\/p>\n

Oscar Piastri at the wheel of the new McLaren on Wednesday.\u00a0NurPhoto via Getty Images<\/p>\n

He will be the solo pilot on board on Friday night.<\/p>\n

“It all ran smoothly and I feel like I got a better handle of what the car’s doing and what it needs,” he said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

“The conditions are very different here compared to Barcelona, so it was good to get some running in a different environment.<\/p>\n

“We’ll go through the data, see what we can pull out from it and how we can improve ahead of getting back on track.”<\/p>\n

Piastri will start his 2026 campaign at the Australian Grand Prix in his hometown of Melbourne on March 8.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A massive change has been made to Oscar Piastri‘s innermost circle ahead of the 2026 F1 season. Mark…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":476466,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,817,813,816,85],"class_list":["post-476465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/476466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}