- Piastri enters his fourth Formula 1 season having reshaped the support structure.
- Mark Webber steps back from trackside duties, ending a valued circuit-side presence.
- Pedro Matos and sports psychologist Emma Murray now fill that gap.
There is a moment in every athlete’s life when the teacher becomes less necessary. For Oscar Piastri, that moment arrived quietly, without drama, somewhere between his first Formula 1 race and the start of his fourth season.
Mark Webber, the nine-time grand prix winner who has managed Piastri since 2019, is no longer a regular presence at circuits in 2026. The change is not a falling-out. It is something closer to a graduation.
A bond built from the junior ranks
Webber first spotted Piastri when the young Australian was still a teenager competing in the Formula Renault Eurocup.
He took him on, guided him through the junior categories and stood by him at the track for most of his early Formula 1 career.
That constant presence mattered most when everything was new, and the learning curve was steepest. Webber had lived through championship battles at Red Bull.
He knew which questions to ask before a young driver even knew they needed asking.
“Especially year one of F1, there were a lot of questions that hadn’t even crossed my mind that Mark was asking as if they were obvious to me and the team,” Piastri told Fox Sports.
That quote reveals something specific about what good mentorship actually looks like.
Webber was not simply a reassuring face in the garage. He was actively scanning for blind spots, carrying a veteran’s instincts into rooms where Piastri still lacked the experience to know what he did not know.
A driver in his debut season is often too busy surviving to step back and think clearly. Webber did that stepping back for him.
The result was a partnership that quietly shaped how Piastri approached the weekend, race by race, circuit by circuit.
A natural evolution, not a rupture
When the news broke ahead of 2026, speculation followed quickly.
Former Formula 1 driver Ralf Schumacher suggested on the Backstage Boxengasse podcast that McLaren had pushed for the change, pointing to tensions between Webber and the Woking team after a turbulent end to the 2025 season.
Incidents at Monza and Singapore had raised questions about favouritism towards Lando Norris and, according to those reports, strained the relationship between Webber and McLaren.
Piastri has addressed this directly and consistently. He told the media, including PlanetF1.com, during pre-season testing in Bahrain, that no single event triggered the change.
“There’s nothing specific that triggered it,” he said. “Mark is still very much involved, and I’ve been in contact with him a lot over the last few weeks. He just won’t be trackside as much anymore.”
In a recent Fox Sports interview, Piastri offered the clearest explanation yet.
“[Webber] is still very much involved, and I’ve still spoken to him a lot through the start of the year,” he said.
“I’m getting more experience in my own career, and there’s also an element of I’ve just got more experience, so I can make some of these decisions, ask some of these questions myself.”
He added, “I think now some of those questions come a lot more naturally for me. It’s just a natural evolution, really.”
Pedro Matos steps into the trackside role
The person filling the gap at the circuit is someone Piastri already trusts.
Pedro Matos engineered his title-winning Formula 2 campaign with Prema in 2021 and worked with him as far back as the 2017 British Formula 4 season.
He is not a McLaren employee, but he will be present at race weekends to offer support and motorsport expertise.
Also joining the trackside team is Emma Murray, a prominent Australian sports psychologist.
Murray is known in motorsport for her work with Scott McLaughlin following his painful near-miss in the 2017 Supercars season, before he went on to win three consecutive championships.
Webber, meanwhile, shifts his focus to the commercial side of Piastri’s career, managing sponsorship deals and partnerships. That responsibility has grown considerably as Piastri has become one of the sport’s most marketable names.
A driver grown into his own shape
What this restructuring reveals is something beyond management logistics.
It describes a driver who has steadily grown into the full weight of competing at the front of Formula 1, not just in pace, but in maturity, self-reliance and composure under pressure.
The 2026 regulations have reset parts of the competitive order, giving Piastri a fresh canvas to work on. After the 2025 season finale in Abu Dhabi, Webber said publicly that Piastri would return bigger and better. Early signs suggest he was right.
The mentor’s greatest measure of success is the day his presence is no longer essential. By Piastri’s own account, that day has arrived.
What remains is not an absence but a new shape to a relationship that clearly still matters to both of them.
