McLaren chief Zak Brown has revealed he had to shield his team from the “beating up” it took over claims of Lando Norris bias in the Englishman’s F1 title fight with Oscar Piastri last year, but was confident tweaks to the team’s infamous ‘papaya rules’ would keep both drivers happy.
As he declared his star driver pairing would again be “free to race” this season, Brown said the “hostile” response the team received over alleged Norris favouritism was hurtful and “counter-productive” to Piastri’s cause.
The McLaren duo battled it out in a tense intra-team fight for the world championship last year, but the team faced conspiracy theories and came under fire for alleged bias as Piastri’s title hopes slipped late in the year.
The debate down under even reached parliament with Australian senator Matt Canavan questioning whether McLaren was biased against Piastri and costing him the world championship ahead of the season-ending race in Abu Dhabi.
Piastri addressed the debate in the pre-season when he said he had received a “fair shot”, but added the team had created some unnecessary “headaches” for itself.
Brown conceded McLaren had made “mistakes”, but none were intentional and said the team pile-on had been unfair.
“It’s disappointing and unfortunate because people aren’t as informed or what you see on TV isn’t necessarily what is going on,” Brown said.
“The part that I guess I’m most disappointed about is Oscar needs his team to win a world championship and everyone that is critical and cheering for Oscar, they are being counter-productive to helping him win a championship when they are beating up on his racing team.
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“I can shrug it off, but we’ve got a lot of people in the racing team and when things are sent their way, they are human and I want to protect the racing team.
“It’s unfortunate, you can’t control it. We’ve tried to explain it a thousand times but you just have some people in this world who would rather run with the conspiracy theory.
“As the leader of the team, I kind of tell them point them my way …. they’re human beings, they’re giving it all they’ve got.
“They’ve got families and kids so it is unfortunate some people can be so hostile and they’re wrong.
“No one said we’re perfect and we did make mistakes, but they weren’t intentional or prioritised.”
Having led the championship by 34 points two thirds of the way into the season, Piastri missed out on the F1 title to Norris in a thrilling three-way battle for the drivers’ crown at the end of the year.
Norris clinched his maiden world title by just two points ahead of Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, while Piastri finished a further 11 points behind in third place.
Brown said he had held numerous conversations with Piastri over the off-season about how the team could improve, but denied there had needed to be a “smoothing” of the waters.
“I know a lot of people have that view. That was never his view,” Brown said.
“That is what has always been very important to us is the feeling inside the house, if you like.
“So there was nothing to smooth over. We made mistakes, he made mistakes, Lando made mistakes. That happens. But he (Piastri) always knew from day one that we were doing our best to have sporting fairness.
“Obviously fans get excited and have their views of what that looks like, but they don’t really know what is going on inside the team.
“(Our conversations were) more talking about how do we keep getting faster and better. There was no looking back or smoothing anything over, it was more what do we need to do collectively together as a team, how do we communicate better?
“It was just about him giving us feedback on what is going to give him the best environment to succeed in. So they are all very healthy conversations.”
McLaren drew plenty of headlines over its rules of engagement between its drivers – dubbed the ‘papaya rules’ – which were put in place to ensure fair and equal fight on track.
Team principal Andrea Stella flagged a “streamlined” approach to the rules in the off-season, which Brown said would largely centre on communication.
Brown said he was “very confident” the tweaks would keep both drivers happy this year.
He added it was inevitable there would be racing incidents again and there would be times the team “steps in” for the betterment of the squad.
“Now, we are going to have our incidents because this is racing. You have two drivers, unbelievably competitive, racing each other hard so it is going to happen,” Brown said.
“So we are comfortable with that and anticipating that.
“I always said it wasn’t if our two drivers come together, (rather) when our two drivers come together. Fair to say I’ll say that again and that doesn’t necessarily mean 2026, it might be 2027. But they’re going to trade paint as they say in the world of NASCAR at some point.
“They know that, we know that. As long as it’s not intentional, which none of the incidents that they had last year – which were all pretty minor – none of them were intentional, it was just hard racing.
“We welcome the hard racing. Really the rule has always just been to treat your teammate with respect, race them hard.
“The tweaks are more around some communications and things of that nature.
“Even though they’re free to race, there will be times the team steps in and goes ‘For the betterment of both of you guys and the team, we don’t know if you’re going to slicks or wets or intermediates, so let’s just pause for a moment’.
“They were free to race all year (last season) and we’ll let them again, but we’ll race intelligently when it makes time sense to race as a team because of circumstances we’ll do that. There’s not much change other than a little bit of communication.”
ENDS