Riccardo Patrese believes that McLaren will soon need to make the uncomfortable decision to prioritise Oscar Piastri over Lando Norris in the Drivers’ Championship fight, should Max Verstappen continue to make significant inroads on the Australian’s advantage.
The 28-year-old was over 100 points behind Piastri after the Australian won the Dutch Grand Prix, but Red Bull took a significant step forward after the trip to Zandvoort, and Verstappen rattled off back-to-back race wins in Monza and Baku. Now, with seven events remaining, the four-time world champion has cut the deficit to 69 points.
For now, Piastri is still in a comfortable position, with Verstappen needing 10 points per race over the 24-year-old to surpass him for a fifth successive crown. However, if the gap continues to close, McLaren will start to feel the heat.
According to six-time Grand Prix winner Patrese, the time may come to end Norris’ title fight and prioritise getting Piastri across the line. “When you have this situation where you are so superior as McLaren has shown until the last two races, you can talk about ‘We are a team’,” he told Escapist Magazine.
“But at the end, they must make decisions. At Williams, when I was driving there, we were a team. We were a team. Everybody was working for the best of the team and the drivers. But then at the end, the same in Brabham, when we were going for the championship, the team has to work for the best result of the driver and the team.
“If somebody else starts pushing like Verstappen could do, then you need to be a team and make a decision. You need to make a decision. It’s not that probably somebody will not be happy. That will be Norris.
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“With Brabham in 1983 they told me, ‘Okay, we have to go for the championship with Nelson Piquet.’ I did it because otherwise we couldn’t beat Prost with Renault. We were testing new things on my car to improve the parts and then put them on Nelson’s engine for the next race.
“Probably, I stayed 17 years in Formula One because the teams I worked for, they knew that I was a very loyal driver. And I was more keen to help the team than to look about my [own] interest.”
For Zak Brown and Andrea Stella, this would be a nightmare outcome. The McLaren leadership duo have prioritised fair and equal opportunities above all else in their management of Piastri and Norris’ intra-team title fight, even going so far as to impose team orders during races.
