‘We won’t do it’ - McLaren set record straight over picking favourites

McLaren refuse to favour either Lando Norris or Oscar Piastri in the 2025 F1 world championship fight.

Following a dominant victory last time out in Mexico City, Norris leads the championship by one point over teammate Piastri with four races remaining.

But Red Bull’s Max Verstappen remains a threat to the McLaren pair, sitting just 36 points adrift of Norris as he remains in the hunt for a fifth consecutive world title.

Despite Verstappen making it a three-way title fight thanks to Red Bull’s incredible resurgence in recent months, McLaren will not resort to “playing favourites” with one of their drivers.

Asked what his response would be if Verstappen beats the McLaren drivers to the title, McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown told F1's Beyond The Grid podcast: “I shake his hand and say, ‘job well done’. I want to make sure if we don’t win, he beats us. We don’t beat ourselves - that’s important.

“We’re well aware of 2007. Two drivers tied on points, one gets in the front. But we’ve got two drivers who want to win the world championship. We’re playing offence; we’re not playing defence.

“I’d rather go, ‘we did the best we can on our drivers tied in points and the other 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, ‘I know you have a dream to win the world championship but we flipped the coin and you don’t get to do it this year’. Forget it!

“That’s not how we go racing. In the event that 2007 happens again, I’d rather have that outcome than all the other outcomes by playing favourites - we won’t do it.”

McLaren won’t pick ‘preferred son’

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella echoed Brown’s view, insisting the Woking squad will not get into a situation of having to choose a “preferred son” out of Piastri and Norris.

“If Max is the champion at the end of the year, for us, the important thing is that we can say we have done our best and we have done our best according to the way we go racing,” the Italian said.

“And if Max wins this year, we say we’re going to win next year, we’re going to be there and we are going to be united as we are.

"So when you are in my role, it’s like when you have two sons and somebody says, 'which one is your preferred son?' Yeah, but they are my two sons, how can you say which one is the preferred one?”

"Sometimes when I hear or read some comments of this kind, I find them really very superficial and just like, I think sometimes people don’t really understand what it means to have two drivers that are with you together in this journey in Formula 1. I just feel very grateful to both."