Should McLaren be focusing on one driver for the title? We have seen other teams be dominant at the beginning of a season and slip back later on. – Luke
This debate is an interesting one.
On one side, teams often receive criticism when they impose team orders and favour one driver over another.
On another, the same can happen when they have two evenly matched drivers, both in a title fight, and they split the points between them against a rival who is the only driver challenging from another team.
The second is clearly the case this year.
For parallels in history, one can look back, for example, to 1986, when the Williams was the fastest car but Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet made a pair of warring team-mates and McLaren’s Alain Prost drove a wonderful season to slip through the middle and claim the title in a dramatic final race in Australia.
Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri are – so far – very much not Mansell and Piquet. Relations between them are good and the intra-team battle is being conducted in a way for which all teams would wish.
McLaren don’t really have a choice at the moment but to conduct this season as they are so far doing.
Norris and Piastri have contracts that guarantee them equal treatment, and as a team McLaren’s philosophy is to allow free competition between their drivers.
The one proviso is that they remember they are driving for a team and that, from time to time, they may be asked to do something that maximises the team’s interests but perhaps not their own.
McLaren are approaching this with a philosophy of openness. Keep talking. Don’t let anything go unsaid. Be honest. If an issue comes up, it’ll because no one had thought of it. Not because of any attempt to conceal.
They accept that the drivers are likely to clash, but they believe that, because of their approach, they will be able to handle that, too.
So far, it’s working. They accept that Max Verstappen is a real threat, even that there is a risk he could ‘do a Prost’.
But as Piastri put it in a BBC Sport interview in Monaco: “It is a possibility, yes. But, on both sides of the garage here, we want to win because we’ve been the best driver, the best team, including against the other car in the team. You always want to earn things on merit and you want to be able to beat everyone, including your team-mates.
“So that gives Lando and I the best chance of our personal goals of trying to become drivers’ world champion, while also achieving the main result for the team, which is the constructors’ championship.
“If we do get beaten by Max, of course that would hurt, but we would know that we both had the same opportunity, we were racing everybody out there and that’s just how it panned out.
“For us it’s the most straightforward, the fairest way of going racing and that’s what we’ve asked for.”