McLaren CEO Zak Brown has confessed that Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris’ title fight in Formula 1 could mirror the team’s contentious 2007 intra-team battle.
Piastri and Norris are leading the way in the Drivers’ standings, separated by just nine points, the team’s MCL39 challenger enabling them to open up a huge gap on their rivals.
McLaren’s philosophy of ‘papaya rules,’ whereby both men are allowed to race each other but without negative consequence to the team, has been longstanding.
Despite the pair’s collision in Canada – which saw Norris retire – and some close shaves in both Austria and Hungary, the rule has largely been adhered to.
Even the Montreal moment was quickly nipped in the bud, with Norris taking public responsibility, and both men moving on from the incident.
This is a stark contrast to 2007, in which a rookie Lewis Hamilton and then-reigning World Champion Fernando Alonso battled amid extreme needle.
Incidents such as one at that year’s Hungarian Grand Prix, in which Alonso was adjudged to have deliberately held Hamilton up in the pit lane during qualifying, contributed to both men eventually losing out to Kimi Raikkonen.
Whilst it would take a minor miracle for neither driver not to win the championship now, Brown has acknowledged that a repeat is not an impossibility.
“We have our belief system, and we just stick to it,” he said. “We’re comfortable with how we go racing.
“We also know we don’t always get it right. We are and always will be, and I think we always have been, a two car team.
“We recognise the consequences of that could be 2007. You got two drivers that tie and lose to Kimi by a point.
“We could have won that Drivers’ Championship, but who do you pick? And then you run the risk of the guy you don’t pick, he’s out of here.
“Our drivers are treated equally fairly. There’s nothing in their contract that gives one priority over the other, nor have they ever asked for that. They just want fair and equal treatment.”
Brown reiterated that the Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships are treated with equal importance to the Woking-based squad.
“We know that benefits the team. They accept that, they’re cool with that, and we know the risk of that, if you’d like, from a driver point of view, is 2007,” he continued.
“But I think the downside of favouring one or the other is one then wants to leave, which is exactly what happened at the end of ’07 [anyway].
“And you put the Constructors’ Championship at risk, right? You see other teams favour one, and that kind of is beneficial to the Drivers’ Championship, but detrimental to the Constructors’.
“Both championships are equally important to us.”
The differences between the McLaren 2007 and 2025 battle
Whilst comparisons of 2007 are not far from his mind, Brown also made the point that the circumstances are slightly different.
Alonso arrived at McLaren fresh from back-to-back titles, with Hamilton fresh into the sport, largely expected to be a more dutiful number two to the established Spaniard.
Despite Norris competing in his seventh season of F1, Piastri is now in his third, and therefore firmly embedded into the fraternity.
“If it was like year one, it’d be like ‘this rookie has given me a run for my money’,” Brown said.
“But I think now that they’re ‘veterans’, it doesn’t matter who’s been here longer, how long they’ve been in.
“I think he [Norris] has just got a mindset of, ‘I want to win the championship and my team-mate’s my number one competition’.
“So I don’t think it’ll be easier or harder for either of them.
“They both can smell the championship, and only one can win it. So I’m sure it’ll be hard on the one that doesn’t win the championship, assuming the other one does. But I don’t think tenure matters now.
“I’m sure Fernando was going, ‘Man, this Lewis guy just got here, this is really irritating’. But he [Norris] doesn’t say anything about that.”
McLaren ‘talk about’ potential Piastri/Norris battles openly
Hamilton and Alonso’s battle spilt over into a sense of genuine off-track contention, something that has yet to happen between Norris and Piastri.
Despite the closeness of the racing and their obvious will to succeed, Brown is confident the pair’s relationship will not degenerate into something similar.
“I don’t think they’ll properly fall out,” the American said. “Because of the communication, trust and respect we all have, and they have for each other.
“We’re very fortunate to have the two personalities that we have. We love the challenge – like, I’m looking forward to them racing each other. So we like it.”
Brown revealed that the team meet the pair’s on-track battles head-on, and said that there is transparency in how both men race each other, with frank discussions.
“It’s not the elephant in the room. We talk about it,” he added.
“We meet every Sunday morning after we’ve seen how qualifying is going. They know each other’s strategy. We’re totally transparent.
“I’ve said to both of them individually, the windows of opportunity – has your team-mate ever done anything to piss you off? Never. And that’s what they both said.
“So there’s competitiveness brewing. We’re not feeling any tension. As the championship builds, I’m sure that tension will grow, but like Montreal, I’m glad we got it out of the way, because it was a non-event. Lando owned it. Oscar understood it was a mistake.
“We’re fully anticipating them swapping paint again at some point. I’m very confident it won’t be deliberate, which is where you then get into the problems.
“They will have racing incidents in their further time here at McLaren. We know that. They know that. So we’re not afraid of that.
“I’m positive they’re never going to run each other off the track, and that’s where you get into bad blood.
“It seems like from the outside looking in, when you’ve seen battles between other team-mates, you’re seeing it brewing, and you kind of go like ‘have they jumped on that, or are they just kind of letting it’?
“We’ll take the air out of the balloon right away if we feel like anything’s bubbling up. But we’ve not seen any of it.”
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