The McLaren team principal, Andrea Stella, has insisted they will not give preferential treatment to Lando Norris over his teammate Oscar Piastri even as the British driver begins a run-in for the Formula One world championship against Max Verstappen.
Norris beat Verstappen with a dominant drive at Zandvoort to win the Dutch Grand Prix on Sunday, retaking the lead after the Dutchman had beaten him off the start line. In so doing he demonstrated that the McLaren is now the quickest car in the field, surpassing Verstappen’s Red Bull, which had been all but untouchable early in the season.
Verstappen’s opening run of seven wins from 10 races enabled him to amass a huge lead over Norris but the 24-year-old has since come back and now trails his rival by 70 points with nine races remaining. Overcoming the deficit will be a serious challenge but McLaren have been emphatic they will not designate Norris as No 1 driver to the detriment of his teammate, although Piastri cannot challenge for the title.
At Hungary Norris took the lead from Piastri through the team’s pit stop strategy and was ordered to give it back, despite it costing him points in the battle against Verstappen. Norris eventually did so and Stella insisted in the Netherlands McLaren would maintain a level playing field for their drivers.
“We already have conversations around team orders from race one because you always want to enter a race having clarity as to how we will manage internal competition,” Stella said. “This happens all season, then you have to take this conversation in the context of what the drivers’ classification is.
“We have nine races ahead of us and if we create a No 1 driver what do we do? All the favours to one driver? This is not a healthy way of running a team. For every race we will analyse the situations and in the 50-50 situations, in this case if Lando needs a bit of extra support, we are going to give it to him. But the team includes Oscar, the team should not do things that are not reasonable to Oscar. We are in this together.”
Norris said he believes the McLaren is now the quickest car in the field after he beat Verstappen by almost 23 seconds in Zandvoort. However, to bridge the gap to the championship leader he will need every point he can score and potentially the assistance of his teammate. How his team manage their relationship now will be under intense scrutiny.
McLaren had brought a new set of upgrades to Zandvoort, their first major development since the Miami GP, and Stella believes that while Red Bull remained likely to have the advantage on some circuits, particularly those with high-speed corners, McLaren were on course to surpass them at every track.
“Thanks to the upgrades now we will now be more competitive even where Red Bull were faster than us,” he said. “We think the car in the current configuration is possibly not enough in terms of the performance required to be the best car at every single event, that’s why we plan to deliver more upgrades before the end of the season.”
Norris’s win in Zandvoort was significant as it is the first time Verstappen has been denied victory at his home race but also because of the margin by which he was defeated, which the Dutchman referred to as “alarming”.
For McLaren it was also no small moment. It is the team’s first win at Zandvoort since Niki Lauda took the flag in 1985, when the race was held for the last time before it returned to the calendar in 2021. The team now trail Red Bull by only 30 points in the standings, a margin that looks well within their grasp as they attempt to secure their first constructors’ championship since 1998.
