Oscar winner out to emulate Senna's four-in-a-row
Oscar Piastri's extraordinary 2025 surge from McLaren support act to Formula One's leading man could take him into rarefied air this weekend at the storied Imola circuit in Italy.
After three successive victories in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Miami, the next aim for the soaring Victorian is to make it four-in-a-row at the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix on Sunday, a run that only 15 of the sport's greatest drivers, world champions all, have ever achieved or surpassed.
And of that illustrious list, only one - the late, great Ayrton Senna - ever achieved the feat for the McLaren team that the 24-year-old Aussie is currently spearheading.
Senna, the 31st anniversary of whose death at Imola will doubtless be marked there as emotionally as ever this weekend, achieved four straight for McLaren on two occasions, the last in 1991 when he opened the season with wins at the US GP, his home Brazilian GP, then at Imola in the San Marino GP and, finally, at Monaco.
Senna went on to comfortably win the title that year, just as he triumphed in 1988 when he he won the British, German, Hungarian, and Belgian GPs in succession.
No driver has achieved a quartet of wins on the bounce since world champion Max Verstappen's nine-straight, which straddled the end of the 2023 season and early last year.
And four in a row has only ever been achieved by one Australian driver - the great Jack Brabham, who achieved the feat in 1966 but who'd actually gone one better than that when winning his second world title in 1960, taking victory in five successive races.
THE DRIVERS WHO'VE WON FOUR OR MORE F1 GRANDS PRIX IN A ROW:
* Max Verstappen - 10 in a row (2023) - (Also runs of 9 and 5)
* Sebastian Vettel - 9 (2013) - (also two runs of 4)
* Alberto Ascari - 7 (1952-53)
* Michael Schumacher - 7 (2004) - (also runs of 6, 5 and two 4s)
* Nico Rosberg - 7 (2015-16)
* Jack Brabham - 5 (1960) - (Also run of 4)
* Lewis Hamilton - 5 (2014 and in 2020) - (Also five runs of 4)
* Jim Clark - 5 (1965) - (Also one run of 4)
* Nigel Mansell - 5 (1992)
* Jochen Rindt - 4 (1970)
* Ayrton Senna - 4 (1988 and 1991)
* Alain Prost - 4 (1993)
* Damon Hill - 4 (1995-96)
* Fernando Alonso - 4 (2006)
* Jenson Button - 4 (2009)
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