The McLaren Formula One team is riding high in 2025. The racers from Woking have finally built a car capable of challenging Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes on raw pace, and it has two of the sharpest young drivers on the grid in Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri. At the halfway mark of the campaign, only nine points separate them. Both are chasing their maiden world championship.
The team insists there is only one rule—keep it clean. Beyond that, Andrea Stella and Zak Brown have given their drivers the freedom to race. On paper, it is an enviable position. In reality, it is a high-wire act without a safety net.
Former McLaren driver David Coulthard has warned not to mistake the current civility between the pair for harmony. Speaking on the Indo Sport podcast, he argued that no driver can be friends with the man in the other side of the garage. “He’s not your mate,” Coulthard said of the teammate dynamic. “He’s your biggest rival. Your success is his failure and vice versa. You can admire them, you can respect them, but if you’re happy for your competitor to beat you, you’re not wired right.”
Ex-F1 driver sees “volatile relationships” coming
There have been signs that the McLaren battle between their drivers cold boil over already this season. In Canada, Norris attempted a bold move on Piastri, only to collide with him and the concrete barrier. Lando retired, Piastri salvaged fourth. The team described it as a “racing incident,” but the optics were clear: two drivers fighting for the same prize will inevitably step on each other’s toes.
Coulthard sees a familiar pattern. “These are volatile relationships to manage,” he explained. “We’ve already seen little signs of it. One of those guys will be world champion this year, and it might be the only chance they ever get. Next year’s McLaren might not be competitive. It’s still called Formula 1, but it could be a completely different sport. This might be it.”
For McLaren, this is not unfamiliar territory. The team has housed some of the sport’s fiercest rivalries. The most famous was Prost versus Senna in the late 1980s. Ron Dennis managed the partnership with the delicacy of a man juggling a lit firework. The pair pushed each other to extraordinary heights, but the relationship imploded spectacularly, culminating in collisions at Suzuka in both 1989 and 1990.
McLaren have form with waring team mates
Fast forward to 2007, when rookie Lewis Hamilton was paired with reigning champion Fernando Alonso. The result was an explosive year that tore McLaren apart from within. Hamilton refused to yield, Alonso felt betrayed, and the destructive internal battles within the McLaren team ended up handing the championship to Kimi Räikkönen by a single point
Coulthard himself knows the feeling of animosity with a team mate. He spent nine seasons at McLaren, much of it alongside Mika Häkkinen. “There were moments where I couldn’t stand him, and moments he couldn’t stand me,” he admitted. “We both had a need and a desire to beat the other guy, to break the other guy if we could. It sounds harsh, but that’s how you bring out the best in yourself.”
In hindsight, he views it all as just part of racing. “I can look Mika in the eye now because we’ve been through it. There’s nothing left to hide. Just respect.” The McLaren F1 team now face a similar dilemma. Norris is the team’s homegrown talent, a driver many have viewed as the natural heir to Hamilton in British motorsport. Piastri is the cool-headed Australian who has already proven a match for Norris, winning big races and showing no fear. Both are hungry, both know this could be their only shot at a world title.
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McLaren “papaya rules” are naive
The tension is not just between the drivers. For team boss Andrea Stella, the challenge is to manage the rivalry without sabotaging the campaign. Back one driver too openly, and the other feels betrayed. Let them fight without restraint, and the championship could slip away in a tangle of carbon fibre.
Can McLaren avoid the trap they and other F1 teams have fallen into in days gone by? Will their polite “papaya rules” code of honour stand up when the F1 drivers’ title is almost within one of their drivers grasp? Surely the polite memos and driver briefings are all well and good, but when a world title is at stake, adrenaline will overwhelm civility.
McLaren’s “free to race” policy is noble in theory but naïve in practice. It is akin to telling two hungry lions that there is only one steak but asking them to share. Inevitably, blood will spill. Drivers and team bosses alike will state that Formula 1 is a team sport at heart. Constructors win trophies, yes, but drivers chase immortality.
Glib effort by Brown to comfort the loser
The question is not whether their rivalry will boil over. It is when. Will it be a clumsy wheel bang in Monza, a battle that spills into gravel at Zandvoort, or a strategic war of words in Abu Dhabi? One way or another, McLaren is about to feel the heat soar. One driver will live the dream, whilst the other will be left devastated, something Zak Brown has glibly suggested the team have already considered.
The McLaren CEO said to assembled media last time out in Hungary; “We’ll just sit down and actually have a conversation and go ‘Right, one of you is going to win, it’s going to be the best day of your life – one of you is going to lose, how do you want us to handle that? You want us to jump up and down and celebrate this guy [who] won?’”
“We’re fully aware and sensitive to how you celebrate that situation. And I think we’ll just sit down with the drivers and come to an agreement: ‘One of you is not going to be the champion. How do you want us to act?’. To ask such a question is truly asinine, the driver who loses will be beyond consolation.
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Piastri already downbeat after Norris defeats
Piastri has already displayed body language which suggests he is feeling the pressure, with Norris wining three of the four Grand Prix before the F1 mid-summer break. After the team failed to respond to his request to be given back the lead from his team mate at the British Grand Prix, Piastri was visibly angry. Speaking to Jenson Button directly after the race, Piastri was clearly agitated: “Yeah, I’m not gonna say much. I’ll get myself in trouble, so… well done, to Hulkenberg. I think that’s the highlight of the day, so… yeah, I’ll leave it there.”
Of course the highlight of the day for his team mate, was not Nico Hulkenberg’s first podium in his F1 career, but the race win he had racked up, regardless of his team mate’s ill fortune at the hands of the stewards. Again in Hungary, Piastri appeared disconsolate given the team had out him early on a two stop strategy. Norris at the time of the first round of pit stops sat in fourth place and he elected to switch his strategy to stopping just once in the race.
This proved to be a pivotal moment, and one which won Lando his ninth Grand Prix victory of his career. After the race Piastri questioned whether the strategy given to him by the team was the right one. The team had stopped the Aussie early in Budapest in an attempt to undercut Charles Leclerc who had led from the start. “Yeah, I don’t know if trying to undercut Leclerc was the right call in the end, but yeah, we can go through it after,” said Piastri questioning the wisdom of the team’s call.
Oscar Piastri has had the luxury of leading the championship for the last ten rounds of competition, but his lead once 22 points ahead Norris, has been slashed to just nine points with ten weekends remaining. The pressure on the Australian will mount further should Lando come out on top in Zandvoort and when a career-defining championship is within reach, friendship and loyalty are luxuries few can afford. Norris and Piastri may exchange handshakes on Saturday, but come Sunday afternoon, they will be the most bitter of rivals in the truest sense.
FIA admit changes required to make 2026 cars faster
When Formula 1’s new regulation set for the 2026 cars and power units was first unveiled ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix in 2024, the reception from paddock observers was lukewarm warm. The FIA vision of the next F1 era had promised a radical rebalancing of the formula—lighter, nimbler cars with active aerodynamics, paired with power units split evenly between internal combustion and electrical energy. But lurking behind the glossy renders and FIA bullish press releases was a problem that threatened to embarrass the sport: the new cars were projected to be significantly slower.
For a championship that sells itself as the pinnacle of motorsport, being two or three seconds off the pace of today’s machinery was never going to fly. Drivers, engineers, and even the fans grumbled that Formula 1 risked producing cars slower than Formula 2 in some conditions. That criticism has now pushed the FIA and the teams to act, and the result is a set of tweaks that have clawed back much of the lost performance.
Nikolas Tombazis, the FIA’s head of single-seater matters, has been the man most publicly defending the new formula. Speaking recently, he confirmed that the incoming cars will now be roughly “one second slower per lap” than the current generation—rather than the three-second deficit feared last year…. READ MORE
With over 30 years of experience in Formula 1 as an insider journalist, I have built trusted connections across the paddock, from race engineers and mechanics to senior team figures. At The Judge 13, I and a handful of trusted colleagues share exclusive Formula 1 news, expert analysis and behind-the-scenes stories you will not find in mainstream motorsport media.
