Oscar Piastri switches to Pixel in partnership with Google – looks ahead to the 2026 F1 Season

Aussie Formula One driver Oscar Piastri is fronting a new TV and Social campaign for Google as part of a new personal partnership with the tech giant ahead of the 2026 Season.

While Google has been a McLaren Team sponsor for some years, the company has jumped on board the Oscar Piastri bandwagon to support the young Australian and leverage his brand to promote Google’s Pixel devices and Gemini AI.

I sat down with Oscar for an Exclusive chat this week, to reflect on the year gone, the year ahead and Oscar’s use of AI to turn himself into a “race car driver from the past”.

These social clips and TV commercials will begin appearing this weekend in-line with the Australian Open and the “Brabhamesque” look of Oscar is certainly one to see.

Talking about the partnership, Oscar said “We’re talking about opportunities and Google is one of, if not the biggest company in the world. So to be able to have a partnership with them is is really special just from a brand perspective and to be able to associate myself with with such a big company is is a really cool thing for me personally.”

“the products that Google have, like the Google Pixel phones are so incredibly advanced and cool pieces of of kit.”

Looking at the world of AI, Oscar got a little chance to play around and seemed to like it – “it’s pretty impressive what you can do with Gemini and it’s good fun. “

“we’ve got a lot of downtime on flights or whatever, it’s always nice to have a bit of fun with Gemini creating some pretty wacky ideas. Obviously back in the day, you probably just sat there with pen and paper and tried to draw it with your imagination, but now you can put it into Gemini and it it comes up with something far outweighing any artistic ability that I have. So that’s been been really cool to use that and always a good bit of fun.”

With the final race of 2025 now 40 days behind him, I asked Oscar what he learned about himself through the previous season. He seemed to have reflected well, saying “a number of things. I think there’s a lot of different ways you can take the 2025 season for me, but I think for me, I learned a lot about myself both on and off the track. I feel like I really developed quite a lot as a person, and I feel more mature. I feel more responsible. I feel like I know what I want a bit more now.”

And frankly, there doesn’t appear to be any overarching disappointment from Oscar – he described it well saying “also just a sense of pride. I think even though the the end result wasn’t exactly what I wanted I think to have the the amount of success that I had was something that I would have dreamed of at the start of the year. So obviously there was a few moments I’d rather have again or or rather not have, but I think on the whole very proud of what I was able to achieve and plenty of lessons learned, both good and bad, to take into the future.”

On those “Papaya Rules” which caused so much fuss and conversation – feels like they might be in constant evolution “I mean it gets talked about a lot. I think you know behind the scenes it’s a much much smaller discussion and smaller deal than what it gets made out to be. We’ve got our our ways of going racing and it’s it’s constantly evolving. We’ll do a review and we already have reviewed, do we want to do things exactly the same? Do we want to change things a bit? so yeah, we’ll get a handle on that fully before we we go racing again. But I think for me the intentions were were always in the right place and we’ll do some some tweaking if we feel we need it to try and make life a bit easier for ourselves.”

With around 50 days until the first race of the season in Melbourne, and all new rules and cars, how confident are we that Oscar will again be in a winning position? Will one team dominate again? Oscar is straight to the point, but confident – “difficult to know” he says, “I hope if there is one team that it’s us. That would be good obviously, but it’s difficult to know. I think the engines are are obviously different. There’s some areas that are similar in concept.”

While the rule changes are big, Oscar thinks the basic engine changes aren’t as big overall as they are for the drivers with new controls over the hybrid battery right at the drivers fingertips “obviously the last time we changed engines, it was a very radical change from V8s to V6s and hybrids. Obviously, the hybrid element is is much bigger again now, and that’s going to be a very big change for us as drivers.“

If McLaren isn’t there from day one, Oscar has confidence in his team “with McLaren it doesn’t really matter what set of rules gets thrown at us. We’ll find a way to make it work and produce a competitive car. And I think that’s what we kind of saw in the last rule set. We started off as a team with not a particularly competitive car. When I first joined, we were one of the slowest. and we managed to turn that around incredibly quickly into a car that could achieve podiums and then wins and then back to back constructors championships.”

“So I think no matter what rules we get thrown, I’m confident that we’ll be somewhere at the pointy end, I hope. But there’s definitely going to be a lot of changes for us to get used to as drivers and teams.”

With all these changes happening, I asked Oscar if the on-track experience for fans would be different this year – he’s sure of that, telling me “I think it definitely will be different. Yes.”

“I think in terms of how we we race each other, it’s going to be quite quite different. I think the the hybrid element and managing the battery level is going to be a really important thing. I mean, it has been important in the past, but with that element being so much bigger from this season onwards, there’s going to be a lot more management of that from the drivers ourselves.”

Seems like Melbourne could be an interesting one! So says Oscar “I think especially the beginning of the season, you could see some interesting scenarios between drivers where some are more tactical and saving their battery, some are just trying to get track position and it could be an interesting kind of tactical battle there.“

Whatever the case – We’re in for a great season says Oscar “in all honesty, I also have no idea how it’s going to pan out. But I think it’ll be entertaining one way or another”