LONDON :McLaren boss Zak Brown is preparing to deal with disappointment at the end of the Formula One season, even as the team enjoy one of their most dominant years and a 200th grand prix win at the weekend.
As the title battle between Oscar Piastri and teammate Lando Norris heats up, the McLaren pair separated by just nine points after Sunday’s Hungarian Grand Prix, the American conceded he was thinking also about how to handle the aftermath.
Red Bull’s reigning champion Max Verstappen, the McLaren drivers’ closest rival, is now 97 points off the pace and told reporters at the weekend that he may not win again this year given his car’s issues.
Even before the weekend, both Piastri and Norris cast caution aside and called it a two-horse race.
One of them will surely end the year celebrating a dream come true.
The other will rue what might have been, with a new engine era next season shaking everything up again and chances potentially disappearing.
Losing always hurts, doubly so when it is to a teammate with the same car, and Brown said McLaren would have to deal with the situation sensitively when – although he still insisted on saying if – the time came.
“Eventually… we’ll just sit down and actually have a conversation and go ‘right, one of you is going to win and it’s going to be the best day of your life. One of you is going to lose. How do you want us to handle that?’,” he told a select group of reporters.
“We’ll actually sit down and go ‘Right, you want us to jump up and down and celebrate? This guy won’. So we’re fully aware and sensitive to ‘how do you celebrate that situation?’.”
Australian Piastri has won six races to Norris’s five but the Briton has momentum going into the August break, with three wins from his last four starts.
The pair have had seven one-two finishes from 14 races, including the last four, and have left rivals trailing. McLaren are so far ahead in the constructors’ standings – 299 points over Ferrari – that the crown is a given.
Much has been made of the potential for a falling out between friends, for clashes on track given what is at stake, but Brown was sanguine and said the relationship was only growing stronger.
When Norris ran into the back of Piastri as he challenged for the lead in Canada in June, the Briton defused the situation by immediately taking responsibility.
Piastri locked up behind Norris in Hungary on Sunday, in what could have been a repeat of that Montreal accident, but no contact was made.
Brown said there was no ‘elephant in the room’ at McLaren, with the drivers having complete transparency on strategy and how the team go about racing, and he expected more close calls in future.
“There’s competitiveness brewing… as the championship builds, I’m sure that tension will grow,” said the boss. “We’re fully anticipating them ‘swapping paint’ again at some point, I’m very confident it won’t be deliberate, which is where you then get into the problems.
“They will have racing incidents in their further time here at McLaren, we know that and they know that, so we’re not afraid of that.
“I’m positive they’re never going to run each other off the track, and that’s where you get into bad blood. So they’re free to race… there are rules around our racing, which is respect your teammate, they know that.”
