McLaren would rather lose the drivers championship to Max Verstappen than enforce team orders to guarantee either Lando Norris or Oscar Piastri the title.

The McLaren drivers have been locked in what had appeared to be an exclusive duel for the title this season, with Norris retaking the title lead in Mexico City for the first time in 15 rounds to head Piastri by one point.

But Verstappen has surged into contention late to complicate the title equation. Aided by an upgraded Red Bull Racing car, the defending champion has slashed his deficit from its peak of 104 points after the Dutch Grand Prix to just 36 points with four rounds remaining.

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If Verstappen were to continue gaining on the McLaren drivers at the same rate, he would claim a fifth consecutive championship in Abu Dhabi.

The situation is remarkably similar to the 2007 season, in which McLaren drivers Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso ended the year on equal points after fighting a bitter internal campaign. Ferrari’s Kimi Räikkönen was able to capitalise on the feud by pinching the title lead and the championship at the final round in Brazil.

It’s a risk to which McLaren management has been alive all season, but speaking on F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast, McLaren CEO Zak Brown doubled down on his team’s position against picking a winner.

“We’re well aware of 2007,” he said. “I’d rather go, ‘We did the best we can and our drivers tied on points and the other guy beat us by one’ than the alternative, which is telling one of our drivers right now, when they’re one point away from each other, ‘I know you have a dream to win the world championship, but we flipped a coin and you don’t get to do it this year’.

“Forget it. That’s not how we go racing.

“The best way to win the constructors is to finish first and second in the [drivers] championship, and the best way to win the drivers championship is to have two drivers going for the drivers championship.

“In the event 2007 happens again, I’d rather have that outcome than all the other outcomes by playing favourites. We won’t do it. We’re racers. We’re going racing.”

But Brown said his team wasn’t thinking about the risk of losing the drivers championship to the resurgent Verstappen, with belief high that the team can lock out the title on its own.

“We’ve got two drivers who want to win the world championship,” he said. “We’re playing offence; we’re not playing defence.

“I want to make sure if we don’t win, he beats us, we don’t beat ourselves. That’s important.”

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McLAREN DENIES NORRIS BIAS

McLaren deploying team orders while both its drivers were still in contention for the championship would undermine the team’s painstaking attempts to guarantee equality throughout the season, sometimes to significant controversy.

The so-called ‘papaya rules’ — a phrase coined internally last year but rarely used publicly in 2025 — have seen the pit wall intervene several times in on-track battles, from calling off racing at the first race in Australia to having Piastri and Norris swap places after a slow pit stop in Italy.

Norris was also briefly subject to what was supposed to be a season-long handicap for causing a collision for a first-lap incident in Singapore, only for Piastri’s culpability in having both cars retire on the first lap of the sprint in Austin to cancel it out.

That both drivers have been kept on a short leash, largely without argument, has been in equal parts impressive and contentious, with some arguing it amounts to meddling in the title fight.

But Brown said McLaren was ignoring its critics, arguing that it was for the good of the team that it kept a firm handle on its drivers.

“We are so focused on ourselves and doing the right thing and the commitment we’ve made to the racing team,” he said.

“I think the reason why you see such a great relationship between Lando and Oscar is they know they have equal opportunity to win the world championship.

“We’re transparent. We’re fair. We communicate. We’re not perfect, but we’re racers, and they know that.

“There’s all this noise around, but we don’t let that noise come inside the [McLaren Technology Centre].”

‘Obvious’ Oscar admits to driving change | 02:42

Some have accused McLaren of revealing a preference for Norris’s title campaign through the execution of its internal racing rules, but team principal Andrea Stella rebuffed accusations of bias as being misinformed.

“When you are in my role, it’s like when you have two sons and somebody says, ‘Which one is your preferred son?’ They are my two sons, how can you say which one is the preferred one?

“Sometimes when I hear or read some comments of this kind, I find them really very superficial.

“I think that sometimes people don’t really understand what it means to have two drivers that are with you together on this journey in Formula 1. I just feel very grateful to both.”

Stella defended his team’s approach to applying its racing rules to the battle between its two drivers, insisting that it would set McLaren up for future championship battles without risking the animosity that has frequently torn apart teams with two equally matched title contenders.

“We are here to race,” he said. “We are going to accept the discomfort that this causes when you approach racing like we do.

“There are some practical rules that you need to have — ‘don’t crush into each other’, but apart from that, there’s not much more than this.

“We let them race. We want to see them racing with fairness. We want to see them racing with respect for the brand.

“We do hope and we are working very hard to make sure that the drivers champion drives a papaya car, and if that’s the case, there’s only going to be one.

“For us it’s important that the other one will think that there’s been sportsmanship, there’s been fairness, there’s been equality.

“If Max is the champion at the end of the year, for us, the important thing is that we can say we have done our best — and we have done our best according to the way we go racing.

“If Max wins this year, we say we’re going to win next year. We’re going to be there, and we are going to be there united as we are.

“Within this framework we have the conditions to win even in the future. We are protecting the present. We are protecting the future. They know that they are going to have these opportunities in the future, because the future doesn’t stop at the end of 2025.

“McLaren wants to win in 26, in 27, in 28, and the conditions to do so, we create them now.”