F1: Will McLaren prioritize Norris over Piastri in the face of Verstappen’s threat?

Is It Time to Prioritize Norris? McLaren Faces Crucial Decision in Championship Fight

McLaren’s recent disqualification in Las Vegas has reignited a question that has haunted the team during the “Papaya rules” era: Should McLaren prioritize one of its drivers to win the title? Max Verstappen’s victory on the streets of Las Vegas initially seemed to keep him in the fight for the Formula 1 championship, but McLaren’s technical infringement has put him in the rearview mirror.

This situation is a nightmare scenario for a team that has had to deal with the doubt of whether they are about to repeat the events of 2007, where two teammates fighting each other handed the drivers’ championship to another team. Vegas has made this possibility seem more real than ever, even if Lando Norris remains the favorite. Norris arrives at the Qatar Grand Prix, a sprint weekend with 33 points available, with a 24-point lead over Verstappen and his McLaren teammate, Oscar Piastri. Norris can win the title by finishing third in the remaining three races: the Qatar sprint on Saturday, the Qatar main race on Sunday, and the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix on December 7. Still, it’s about Verstappen, the four-time defending champion, and the idea that it will be easy is illusory. The dramatic events of Sunday in Nevada have raised an obvious question: Is this the moment to favor Norris over Piastri to ensure that a McLaren driver is crowned champion in 2025? Critics might ask: Isn’t the current situation proof that they should have done it from the start?

A Just Fight

The current three-way fight is largely due to Verstappen’s impressive form. McLaren has maintained its commitment to allowing its drivers to compete fairly, according to their own race guidelines. McLaren has won 13 races compared to Red Bull’s six, but these have been split with seven for Norris and six for Piastri, while Red Bull’s six have all been for Verstappen.

Even though the team has won 13 races, the division between Norris and Piastri raises the question of whether McLaren should have implemented team orders earlier in the season. However, the reality is more complex. The idea of backing one of the drivers goes against the philosophy of McLaren CEO Zak Brown on how a drivers’ championship should be won.

“We are playing offense, not defense. I would rather go, ‘We did the best we could and our drivers tied on points and the other guy beat us by one’ than the alternative, which is to tell one of our drivers right now, when they are one point apart, ‘I know you have the dream of winning the world championship, but we flipped a coin and you can’t do it this year’”, Brown declared on the “Beyond the Grid” podcast.

Zak Brown

Brown is constantly reminded of McLaren’s 2007 season when explaining his philosophy. In that year, the battle for the championship between Fernando Alonso and rookie Lewis Hamilton allowed Kimi Räikkönen to win the title in the final in Brazil. Brown insists that he doesn’t care if 2025 follows the same path.

“In the event that 2007 happens again, I would prefer that result to all others when playing the favorites. We don’t. We are racers and we are going to race,” Brown stated.

Zak Brown

The 2007 example is interesting because the lack of harmony between the drivers was due to the fact that team orders were not implemented, while harmony exists this year for the same reason. Alonso’s frustration with the way McLaren executed the 2007 season was justified to some extent by how that championship ended. His main complaint was that the team should have backed him over rookie Hamilton, and when they didn’t, his relationship with Brown’s predecessor, Ron Dennis, fell apart. Without the benefit of hindsight of knowing what Hamilton became, Alonso’s frustration at the time was perfectly understandable.

There’s a stronger argument that the 2007 McLaren should have implemented team orders than in 2025, for the exact point Brown made: It has two drivers competing for their first championship this year, rather than the reigning champion and a sensational rookie. Asking one to support the other would have established the hierarchy between them in the future. Even last year, Piastri was only asked to help Norris win the title when he was mathematically out of it, and Norris moved to return the favor to Piastri at the end of the Qatar sprint race 12 months ago (at which point Verstappen had already beaten him for the drivers’ title). Brown’s philosophy is shared by the man with whom he has rebuilt McLaren: team principal Andrea Stella. Stella worked in the Ferrari teams of the Michael Schumacher era and, in addition to seeing how team orders could create a toxic atmosphere internally, also saw how they deeply destabilized Rubens Barrichello and then Felipe Massa. At the 2010 German Grand Prix, Stella was Alonso’s race engineer at Ferrari when his counterpart Rob Smedley uttered the infamous phrase “Fernando is faster than you; please confirm you understood this message” to Massa. It was possibly the most commented team order ever given to a driver. Massa has since said that it did him more mental damage than the near-fatal accident at the Hungarian Grand Prix 12 months earlier, and he never won another race.

Could McLaren have avoided this scenario?

McLaren could have avoided it, but hindsight is always 20/20. McLaren didn’t know during the August break that Red Bull’s Italian Grand Prix upgrade would turn their car into a race-winning machine overnight. It couldn’t have known that it would lose second and fifth place at the Las Vegas Grand Prix for a technical infringement that measured the equivalent of the width of a hair. Implementing team orders always seems like an easy decision, but in reality, it can be as complicated as walking the tightrope of the “Papaya rules” that McLaren has been navigating for over a year. Let’s say, for example, that the team had decided after Norris’ car failure at the Dutch Grand Prix that Piastri was the man to support instead of Norris; Brown & Co. might be regretting it now if they had done that, given the Australian’s drop in form.

Supporting one driver over the other earlier in the season would likely have meant Piastri getting the nod over Norris, given how long he led the championship. Since winning at Zandvoort, Piastri has conceded a 34-point lead to Norris and a staggering 104-point lead to Verstappen. Imagine the headlines if McLaren had prioritized one driver over the other, only to see the form of the team’s chosen contender falter in the final stretch. There might have been a lingering feeling that something like that could happen anyway: in his two previous seasons as teammates, Piastri’s form was weaker in the final months of the season than Norris’s, largely due to his struggles on low-grip circuits like Austin and Mexico City.

In that timeline, we could be facing a scenario where McLaren strengthened Verstappen’s position by putting all their eggs in the wrong basket. Sometimes, giving yourself two different chances to win can be the best option. A close example to Piastri would also justify Brown’s approach here. Piastri’s manager, Mark Webber, was part of a legendary title fight in 2010, and although he became synonymous with the injustice of hierarchies and team orders, largely thanks to his victory message “not bad for a number 2 driver” at Silverstone in 2010 and the infamous Multi-21 incident in Malaysia 2013, there is another example that is often overlooked. Webber had arrived at that Abu Dhabi climax annoyed because Red Bull had not implemented team orders to allow him to beat his teammate Sebastian Vettel in Brazil in the previous race. Doing so would have put Webber one point behind Alonso going into Abu Dhabi, but would have eliminated Vettel from significant contention. In the end, Red Bull’s decision was absolutely the right one. Alonso’s chances vanished when Ferrari’s pit wall panicked and followed Webber’s Red Bull into an early pit stop, sacrificing track position in the process. It would cost both of them the championship. Vettel won the race and the title, a result that wouldn’t have been enough if he had been moved for Webber in the previous race. By not putting all their eggs in one basket, Red Bull had given themselves a double chance to win the title, which they achieved.

Will McLaren implement team orders now?

We can’t know for sure what McLaren will say until their drivers speak to the media on Thursday, but it’s easy to guess. Asking Piastri to back Norris’s championship now is surely unfathomable given the way the season has gone to this point. Even if it’s hard to imagine, it surely has to be considered, especially if the race unfolds in a strange way on Sunday.

Brown and Stella have never shown any sign that they will deviate from their stated philosophy, and doing so now would seem like panic in the face of Verstappen’s current position in the championship. Different scenarios must be resonating in their minds. What if Norris and Piastri collide again, as they did in the Austin sprint? What if Norris’s car suffers another breakdown in Abu Dhabi, like the one he had in Zandvoort? Surely letting Verstappen continue in the fight next week is the last thing the team can do, given how often F1 title fights tend to unfold dramatically and unpredictably. Then there’s the performance to consider. While Qatar is expected to be a suitable circuit for McLaren, the team may also be forced to sacrifice some performance with a conservative setup that avoids any possibility of a repeat of the plank issue that cost them so much in Nevada. That essentially came from running the ride height too close to the ground in an attempt to optimize the car. In a sprint weekend, with two opportunities to score points, the risk of breaching the regulations is even greater.

Can the team really risk Verstappen being closer than he is now in Abu Dhabi? Let’s not forget either that with 33 points at stake over two days in Qatar, there is a scenario where Verstappen could enter the championship final with the title lead; it’s unlikely, but in a year as unpredictable as this, the only predictable thing has been the regularity of Verstappen’s brilliance.

Brown is clearly sincere in the way he wants to win a championship, but it would be human to start questioning that point of view when the reality of not winning the drivers’ title is now so tempting. He will know that there is no world championship trophy for trying to win things the right way. There is no Wikipedia page listing all the drivers and teams that could claim a moral victory in the fight for the title. Then there’s the historical precedent to consider as well. Would Brown and Stella really let another year go by with one championship and not the other? Since it began in 1958, there have only been 11 occasions where a team has won the constructors’ championship and not the drivers’ championship: McLaren was the most recent entry to that list last year. Perhaps more surprisingly for McLaren, considering what’s at stake, there has only been one occasion where a team has repeated as constructors’ champion without winning the drivers’ championship in either year: Ferrari claimed that accolade in 1982 and 1983. The Scuderia, at least, could attribute some of that to the team’s tragic 1982 season, when Gilles Villeneuve died in an accident at Zolder before Didier Pironi suffered a career-ending accident at Hockenheim while leading the championship. McLaren wouldn’t have such a legitimate excuse if it repeated that Ferrari story. All the indications we have are that McLaren is willing to die on the hill that Brown and Stella have built this season. Fair or not, if that means Verstappen wins the 2025 drivers’ championship, in the eyes of most observers, McLaren would only have themselves to blame.