Oscar Piastri warned about McLaren F1 exit amid rumours over potential Red Bull move

Oscar Piastri has been warned that Formula 1 drivers who move from a top team to become a number one elsewhere rarely end up happy.

That is the view of former Ferrari engineer Rob Smedley, who was speaking about the prospect of Piastri leaving McLaren and joining Red Bull amid recent reports.

Red Bull is said to have singled out Piastri as its ‘Plan B’ in the event Max Verstappen leaves the team, according to Autosport.

Verstappen is contracted to Red Bull until the end of 2028 but has threatened to quit F1 due to his dissatisfaction with the much-maligned engine regulations introduced for this season.

But Smedley has advised Piastri, who missed out on a maiden world championship last year to team-mate Lando Norris, that the grass isn’t always greener elsewhere.

"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?” Smedley said on the High Performance Racing podcast.

“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?

"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.”

Former Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer agreed with Smedley’s verdict.

"Yeah, because there's two things that happen,” he 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."