McLaren CEO Zak Brown insists Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri will not fall out despite battling each other for the World Drivers’ Championship. Title battles between team-mates have often caused major rifts, but McLaren are hopeful that will not happen between their drivers.
Piastri currently leads Norris by nine points following the latter’s victory at the Hungarian Grand Prix. Their rivalry could ignite in the second half of the season, particularly if the gap in the Drivers’ Championship standings remains close. McLaren have so far dealt with any disagreements, and Brown expects that to continue to be the case. “I don’t think they’ll properly fall out because of the communication, trust and respect we all have, and they have for each other,” he said.
“We’re very fortunate to have the two personalities that we have. We love the challenge. I’m looking forward to them racing each other.
“I’ve said to both of them individually, at windows of opportunity, ‘has your team-mate ever done anything to annoy you?’ [The answer is] ‘Never’. And that’s what they both said.
“So there’s competitiveness brewing. We’re not feeling any tension. As the championship builds I’m sure that tension will grow, but like Montreal – I’m glad we got it out of the way, because it was a non-event, Lando owned it, Oscar understood, it was a mistake.”
Brown referred to Norris inadvertently colliding with Piastri at the Canadian Grand Prix in June. The American believes similar incidents will happen again when the Formula One season resumes at the end of the month.
However, he does not expect either Norris or Piastri to purposely crash into their colleague.
Brown continued: “I’m positive they’re never going to run each other off the track, and that’s where you get into bad blood. If something bubbles up, we’ll deal with it. And how we operate, which is [in] an open, transparent, deal with it right away [manner].
“It seems like from the outside looking in, when you’ve seen battles between other team-mates, you’ve kind of seen it brewing, and you kind of go like ‘have they jumped on that, or are they just kind of letting it build up?’ We’ll take the air out of the balloon right away, if we feel like anything’s bubbling up, but we’ve not seen any of it.”
Piastri has 284 points to Norris’ 275. Their closest challenger is Max Verstappen, who has 187 points despite a tough season in an unpredictable Red Bull car.