{"id":916920,"date":"2026-10-01T19:12:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T19:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/916920\/"},"modified":"2026-10-01T19:12:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T19:12:11","slug":"oscar-piastri-brushes-off-f1-friendship-fears-after-langkawi-boys-trip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/916920\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscar Piastri brushes off F1 friendship fears after Langkawi boys’ trip"},"content":{"rendered":"

McLaren<\/a> driver Oscar Piastri<\/a> has brushed off concerns that close friendships between Formula 1 drivers could impact their competitive edge on track.<\/p>\n

McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown stated in his book that he prefers drivers not to be friends, explaining that off-track camaraderie can make them reluctant to race each other aggressively.<\/p>\n

Several of the current F1 drivers went to the island of Langkawi for a boys’ trip between the Azerbaijan Grand\u00a0Prix and the Bahrain Grand\u00a0Prix, which is being held in Malaysia.<\/p>\n

Piastri joined the holiday along with his McLaren team-mate Lando Norris<\/a>, Mercedes’ George Russell<\/a>, Haas’s Oliver Bearman<\/a>, Audi’s Gabriel Bortoleto<\/a> and Williams<\/a> drivers Alex\u00a0Albon<\/a> and Carlos Sainz<\/a>. Russell initially shared updates from the trip on Instagram, with the post reaching over 950,000 likes by the time of writing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Cheers for picking up the bill,” Piastri commented on the post. The Mercedes<\/a> driver later clarified that most of the bills were put on his tab.<\/p>\n

Other comments from fans included: “George, thank you for feeding us all this Landoscar content, never stop,” and “God I love this thank you. Netflix, I hope you cover it for DtS [Drive to Survive].”<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Speaking to the media ahead of the Bahrain Grand Prix\u00a0weekend at the Sepang International Circuit, Piastri was asked if Brown had contacted him about the trip.<\/p>\n

“No, he hasn’t,” the Australian said. “It was pretty last-minute.”<\/p>\n

For Piastri, the trip was a rare opportunity to switch off from the F1 championship.<\/p>\n

“It was good fun just being able to switch off from racing a bit. It’s very rare that you get so many drivers together, just spending time together away from a racetrack,” he continued.<\/p>\n

“And at the end of the day, we’re 22 guys that love racing. Obviously, it’s a bit tricky to talk about certain things because we are racing each other. We’ve got a lot in common that we just never really get to talk about. So it was quite nice.<\/p>\n

“We all did our own separate things at points and whatever; it wasn’t like we were attached to each other for the whole time, but maybe on the go-kart track we were. No, it was good fun, honestly, and I enjoyed it.”<\/p>\n

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– The Motorsport.com Team<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"McLaren driver Oscar Piastri has brushed off concerns that close friendships between Formula 1 drivers could impact their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":916921,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[315894,49,48,578,576,577,590,592,316097,294079,82],"class_list":["post-916920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-bahrain-gp-in-malaysia","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-mclaren","tag-oscar-piastri","tag-oscar-piastri-brushes-off-f1-friendship-fears-after-langkawi-boys-trip","tag-sepang-international-circuit","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=916920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916920\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/916921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=916920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=916920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=916920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}