With two rounds remaining, McLaren must be experiencing an extreme combination of conflicting emotions.

There’s the thrill of being on the cusp of securing the drivers championship, with Lando Norris just two points away from locking down his maiden title and locking in McLaren’s first championship double since Mika Häkkinen in 1998.

But there’s also the alarm of feeling Max Verstappen’s hot breath tingling the nerves on the back of its neck as he threatens to turn McLaren’s dream scenario into a nightmare.

Fox Sports, available on Kayo Sports, is the only place to watch every practice, qualifying session and race in the 2025 FIA Formula One World Championship™ LIVE in 4K. New to Kayo? Join now and get your first month for just $1.

Nearing the end of a season in which the team has gone to sometimes excruciating and controversial lengths to keep the fight between Norris and Oscar Piastri as fair as possible, management will be called upon to consider whether it’s time to trade in its so-called papaya rules in exchange for ruthless pragmatism.

That is, whether it’s time to back one driver’s championship aspirations to stave off Verstappen.

PIT TALK PODCAST: McLaren left Las Vegas with no points after having both cars disqualified for running illegally low. With winner Max Verstappen now just 24 points behind Lando Norris is the drivers title at risk this weekend in Qatar?

McLAREN’S DOOMSDAY BLUEPRINT

The nightmare will feel only more real for the team having lived it before.

Some at Woking will have had first-hand experience of the 2007 season, when McLaren fielded the potent line-up of two-time champion Fernando Alonso and rookie Lewis Hamilton.

McLaren delivered a title-calibre car, but Hamilton proved a much closer match for Alonso than anyone had expected, turning them into the title enemies who spent the year pinching points from one another.

They won four races apiece, half in one-two formation.

But those traded victories meant neither driver shut Ferrari’s Kimi Räikkönen out of the fight.

Two victories to close the year saw Räikkönen pip both McLaren drivers to the title by one point at the final round of the season.

Alonso, the defending champion, had assumed he would be the number one driver in 2007. Then McLaren boss Ron Dennis insisted he never agreed to give the Spaniard priority, but he probably never counted on Hamilton, despite his clearly massive potential, going the distance with the Spaniard either.

The team refused to back either driver, and neither driver won the title as a result.

But rather than a cautionary tale, McLaren CEO Zak Brown sees the team’s even-handedness in 2007 as a virtue.

“We’re well aware of 2007,” he told F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast. “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 [after the Mexico City Grand Prix], ‘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.

“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.”

Explaining the McLaren disqualification | 04:57

HOW CLOSE IS IT?

Brown had espoused a no-team-orders position all season, and the team has lived that through its so-called papaya rules — the sometimes controversial team philosophy that’s attempted to keep the fight fair between through occasional intervention.

But it was an undoubtedly easier position to hold, say, in the first half of the year, when the odds of Verstappen being in contention this late in the year seemed remote.

Even when Brown spoke to Beyond the Grid, after the Mexico City Grand Prix, Verstappen seemed unlikely to get this far. Norris had just taken scored a comprehensive victory from pole in Mexico City while Verstappen qualified fifth and finished third, suggesting McLaren was back on top in the pecking order.

The double disqualification, however, has reinserted some jeopardy into the situation and sharpened the parallels with 2007.

Verstappen’s charge started with an upgrade at the Italian Grand Prix, and since then he’s been almost a match for Norris and Piastri combined.

Drivers championship, rounds 16 to 22

Max Verstappen: 161 points

McLaren: 172 points

(Lando Norris: 115 points)

(Oscar Piastri: 57 points)

Verstappen’s might relative to McLaren is even more stark if we tally the points since Piastri crashed out of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, roughly the start of his downturn.

Drivers championship, rounds 17 to 22

Max Verstappen: 136 points

McLaren: 139 points

(Lando Norris: 97 points)

(Oscar Piastri: 42 points)

The circumstances are different, but not wildly so. Alonso and Hamilton pinched points from each other over the year and occasionally in the final rounds, but Hamilton, like Piastri, had the bulk of his scrappy races in the final part of the season, coinciding with a strong run home from Räikkönen.

And while 2007 is often touted as a comparison, the Las Vegas double disqualification makes a Verstappen championship much more likely by the numbers than it does Räikkönen’s title in 2007 or even, as a second parallel, Sebastian Vettel’s come-from-behind triumph in 2010.

Comparable championship gaps, two rounds remaining

2007: Kimi Räikkönen trailed Lewis Hamilton by 42.5 points*

2010: Sebastian Vettel trailed Fernando Alonso by 25 points

2025: Max Verstappen trails Lando Norris by 24 points

*Räikkönen’s deficit was 17 points but under the old points system that awarded 10 points for victory; the gap has been multiplied by 2.5 to reflect today’s 25-point victory value.

In the context of the above numbers, Verstappen’s form isn’t just threatening, it’s portentous.

Oscar on start: “Barged out of the way” | 01:56

THE COUNTERPOINT

But the above comparable title gaps also make a counterpoint in favour of McLaren’s position.

Vettel’s comeback in 2010 wasn’t from second in the standings; it was from fourth and behind teammate Mark Webber, who seemed the more likely Red Bull Racing driver to win the championship.

Webber had led the championship earlier in the year before a series of errors and misfortune and declining form saw Alonso seize the ascendancy, but with two rounds to go he trailed by only 11 points.

But Red Bull Racing — controversially at the time — refused to back Webber as its most likely champion.

As McLaren is, it too was apparently willing to risk losing the title over prioritising one driver — or, you might argue, it was willing to risk the title over prioritising the driver who wasn’t Vettel.

The matter flared at the following race in Brazil, where Vettel led home a Red Bull Racing one-two. Had he been told to hand Webber victory, the Australian would have gone into the title final with a deficit of only one point to Alonso rather than eight.

But Red Bull Racing’s gamble ultimately proved correct.

Webber qualified and finished behind Alonso in Abu Dhabi when a pit stop gamble got both the Spaniard and the Australian stuck in traffic.

Vettel, meanwhile, qualified on pole and cruised to victory. From 15 points down, he moved to the top of the title table for the first time in his career and won the championship.

It’s not just that Vettel ended up winning the title that suggests Red Bull Racing was right not to intervene.

Vettel won the championship by four points. Had he ceded victory to Webber in Brazil, Alonso would have won his third championship by three points.

Vettel and Webber would have finished the season tied on 249 points.

It would have been almost exactly the same outcome as 2007 but for the opposite reason — ironically for Alonso, who lost out both ways.

You can mount the same argument for this season.

Imagine if McLaren had backed Piastri when he extended his lead to 34 points after Norris’s engine faulted in the Netherlands.

Presumably Piastri would have been shuffled ahead in Italy in Singapore, gaining him a 12-point swing on Norris.

But that wouldn’t have been nearly enough to counteract his poor form in the United States and Mexico City, nor his crash and misfortune in Sao Paulo. It wouldn’t have saved him from the qualifying yellow flags in Las Vegas either.

Norris would still be on top of the title table, but he’d lead Piastri by only 12 points and Verstappen by just 18 points — a worse outcome for the team for bringing the Red Bull Racing driver closer to first place.

McLaren would have been answering questions about whether it backed the wrong driver in the title fight while Verstappen closed in on both.

Team orders aren’t as influential as they’re sometimes made out to be.

Think, for example, back to last year, when McLaren decided ahead of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix that it would use Piastri to help Norris’s title campaign.

Piastri won the race while Norris finished fourth after a disastrous qualifying session. Ironically it was Norris who helped Piastri via team orders when he compromised his own race to slow down Sergio Pérez, who was otherwise a risk of getting ahead through the pit stops.

Italy and Singapore have been the only times since the Netherlands that Piastri and Norris have been close enough to each other on track to influence each other’s races.

At every grand prix other than Italy and Singapore, Norris has been too far ahead to benefit Piastri — and Piastri has been too far behind to benefit Norris — rendering the question redundant.

Analysing pivotal Piastri lap 1 hit | 04:52

BUT IF NOT NOW, WHEN?

Team boss Andrea Stella, speaking at the US Grand Prix, made clear the only circumstances in which team orders would be permissible.

“When it comes to having to make a call as to a driver, this will only be led by mathematics,” he said.

With Norris’s lead out to 24 points ahead of this weekend’s Qatar Grand Prix, we’re agonisingly close to that threshold.

But unlike the run of races in which Norris whittled down and then reversed his title deficit, Piastri no longer looks adrift in terms of pace.

He was competitive in Sao Paulo. While his sprint crash was a combination of bad luck and human error, he would have finished at least second in the grand prix were it not for his roundly criticised penalty.

Similarly, he was likely bound for the front row in Las Vegas before yellow flags in qualifying left him down the order. While the disqualification meant it made no difference to his score, it did make a difference to the discourse around his season.

It simultaneously makes a potential Norris priority more valuable but also more controversial.

In Qatar, a track at which Piastri has historically been strong, he’s likely to be competitive enough to materially help Norris in some way — but that means he might be strong enough to boost his championship hopes at his teammate’s expense.

It’s a fiendishly difficult question McLaren must surely be contemplating, even if the team says it will only intervene when one of the drivers drops out of mathematical contention.

But say Piastri and Norris have a tough sprint but the Australian leads the Englishman in the grand prix behind Verstappen in the lead. The difference in position is the difference between Piastri staying in and being eliminated from the title race. Would that be grounds for intervention?

What if the difference in that scenario is three points — the same number of points Piastri lost to team orders in Italy or McLaren’s nonintervention in Singapore?

What about if Verstappen trails Norris by only 15 points after Qatar and Piastri is still 24 points down — mathematically in it but only just?

What if Verstappen was less than 10 points down and Piastri was still a full race win behind?

What if it was less than five points?

The questions are prickly and the answers are uncomfortable.

But Brown is unmoved.

“We’re playing offence; we’re not playing defence,” he told Beyond the Grid.

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

But if Verstappen clinches the championship in Abu Dhabi, history might reflect that there wasn’t really a difference.