McLaren boss Andrea Stella is confident both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri will not allow their fraught Formula 1 title battle to escalate negatively as the season nears its conclusion.
The Woking-based squad has been juggling its own ‘team first’ attitude with its drivers’ own personal championship ambitions all year, with Norris now leading the title by one point.
McLaren’s situation was perhaps a little easier when Piastri was leading the Drivers’ title by some margin, but as the gap has narrowed, contention has occasionally surfaced.
And as Norris and Piastri have gotten closer in terms of points, Max Verstappen has also worked his way back into the title race, which led to some wondering if the team was better off favouring one driver to nullify the Dutchman’s threat.
But McLaren has stuck to its guns and left its two men to fight it out, albeit under the ‘papaya rules’ of not colliding, in a bid to prevent intra-team rivalries of the past.
Famously, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost were engaged in hugely contentious title run-ins as McLaren drivers, but Stella is adamant that such an instance will not take place again.
“I don’t think that’s the case,” the Italian told media including Motorsport Week ahead of this weekend’s Sao Paulo Grand Prix.
“Obviously, both drivers have known for a long time that the car was competitive, so they knew that there was a possibility to fight for the championship.
“But I don’t see that this is escalating in anything more than focusing each of them on their own weekend and try to extract the maximum.
“This requires a high level of dialogue, but this is something that normally we can do well at McLaren.”
McLaren ‘framework and principles’ will not be broken by F1 title battle
Intra-team rivalries within F1 have, of course, been commonplace throughout the sport’s history, and have often led to some bitter rivalries.
But Stella is insistent that the team’s “framework” and “principles” will not be broken, regardless of Norris and Piastri’s title hopes.
“The history of Formula 1 is certainly a source that we’ve been using on how to approach managing two number one drivers that are in contention for a World Drivers’ Championship,” he said.
“I am personally very proud of our two drivers, our engineers. They collaborate in a way I think that we have not seen before in the history of Formula 1.
“We are not naive. We know that the pressure is high. We know that the stakes are big, but we will continue leaning on our framework, on our principles, on the good conversations.
“And so far, what I’ve seen is that Lando and Oscar have always been very supportive. Yesterday Oscar talked very clearly about the mutual respect, the mutual support that is happening between himself and the team and likewise is happening with Lando.
“We are not naive, but we will work very hard to make sure that this position stays until the end of the championship.”
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