The CEO of the former Constructors’ world champion team underlined that there will be no calculations to favor one of Norris or Piastri, despite the danger represented by Verstappen
“I’d rather lose the World Championship than give team orders”, with these words Zak Brown he explained during Beyond the Grid (the Formula 1 podcast) like the McLaren will handle the season finale. No favoritism between Oscar Plates and Lando Norrisdespite Max’s shadow Verstappenback in the title race after being over 100 points behind the leader, has become increasingly bigger in recent weeks. “Both our drivers want to win the title. We’re attacking, not defending. I’d rather find myself at the end of the year saying ‘we did the best we could, our drivers finished with the same points and our rival beat us by one point’ than the alternative scenario of saying to one of Piastri or Norris ‘I know your dream is to win the title, but we threw a coin and this season it’s your teammate’s turn’. Forget it. We don’t race like that.” The CEO of McLaren therefore responded clearly to those who maintain that the Woking team must favor one of its two drivers in order not to risk missing out on a drivers’ title which, arriving at the Dutch Grand Prix, the first after the summer break, seemed to be in the safe.
THE COMPARISON WITH 2007
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Many fans and professionals are highlighting potential analogies between this championship and that of 2007, in which Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, at the time teammates in McLaren, led the standings with two Grands Prix to go, with the Briton close to winning the title in his first season in Formula 1. In the last two races, however, Hamilton collected only 2 points and Alonso 14. It was Kimi Raikkonen who took advantage of this, winning the last two GPs took home 20 points (the old scoring system was still in force, ed.), winning what remains Ferrari’s last drivers’ title to this day. Asked about the possibility of a similar scenario happening again, Brown responded: “I would rather something like 2007 happen than take home the title through favoritism. That’s not our style.”
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