Last Updated on December 6 2025, 8:46 am
Despite Zak Brown stating he would rather Max Verstappen win the 2025 drivers’ Formula One title than issue team orders to his drivers, come the couch in Abu Dhabi, the CEO of McLaren has done a U-Turn.
xq“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,” he told the beyond the Grid podcast three weeks ago.
Of course this was following Lando Norris dominating the Mexican Grand Prix with Max finishing just third, some 31 seconds behind the McLaren driver. The gap between the protagonists at the time was 36 points with just four race weekends remaining and Norris had for the first time since round 4 in Bahrain take the lead of the championship race back from his team mate.
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“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 there united as we are’.” As if to emphasise how committed he was to McLaren’s self inflicted code of how they go racing, Brown asserted how he would deal with Verstappen winning the title.
“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. And we’re well aware of 2007, two drivers tied on points, one gets in front. But you know, we’ve got two drivers who want to win the World Championship. We’re playing offence, we’re not playing defence.”
Yet in Las Vegas McLaren did “beat themselves” as the team made a horrendous mistake in the setting of the MCL39’s ride height. Both drivers were disqualified from the race whilst Verstappen claimed the 25 points for himself.
McLaren again “beat themselves” in Qatar, with a bizarre strategy call, when every other team decided to pit under the safety car. The team clearly decided their car was so superior to that of Red Bull, that they could afford to hand Max a 26 second advantage by not pitting under the safety car.
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In the end, they were terribly wrong and once again Verstappen took chunks out of Norris championship lead and moved ahead of Piastri to set up the decider in the desert.
In terms of issuing term orders, Brown was defiant McLaren would not do this, eve if it risked a repeat of the year Kimi Raikkonen nipped in at the final race of the year, to pip Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso to the title by just one point.
“In the event 2007 happens again, I’d rather have that outcome than all the other outcomes by playing favourites. We won’t do it. We’re racers, we’re going racing,” Brown stated.
Now that push comes to shove, much of the brash America’s swagger has disappeared, as McLaren face the potential humiliation of throwing away their first drivers title since Lewis Hamilton won it in 2008.
A maelstrom of bad publicity awaits McLaren
When asked if he stood by his word that neither driver would be asked to give way to their team mate, Brown has done a 180 degree turn in Abu Dhabi. “You don’t know how Qualifying is going to go, reliability, but if we get into the race and it’s becoming pretty clear that one has a chance and the other doesn’t, we’re going to do what we can to win the Drivers’ Championship. It would be crazy not to.”
Sky F1’s Craig Slater has predicted a maelstrom of headlines on Monday morning should McLaren manipulate the race in Abu Dhabi. The likelihood is that the team will request Oscar Piastri help his team mate out, should they find Verstappen leading the race on Sunday.
Yet its not a done deal that Max would be leading and Piastri cold merely yield one place to his team mate to ensure Norris finishes at least P3, which is enough for him to be crowned champion. There may be another car between the pair and asking the Australian to give up a place to another team’s driver would look unsightly to say the least.
“They are dammed if they do, dammed if they don’t in some respects,” Brundle told Sky Sports F1 ahead of first practice in Abu Dhabi. “I’m pretty sure they’d rather handle the nuclear fallout of moving their cars around. It’s a team. They spend £400m a year running two racing cars representing 1,000 people back at base and they won the constructors’ and they want to win the drivers’.”
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And of course Brown’s trash talk about ‘jolly hockey sticks’ and shaking Max’s hand were he to win the title is now long forgotten. Brundle sums up the situation as follows:
“What they don’t want to do is let Max Verstappen win the championship. So of course, if it’s in the closing stages and for example, Oscar Piastri, for the sake of dropping down the order because he can’t win the championship, I would certainly be asking the same thing.”
The ex-McLaren driver and specialist Sky F1 commentator does question whether Piastri would be happy to do this or not – and that should the Aussie express discomfort with various scenarios, the team may not even make the request to him.
‘It only takes a touch’
Brundle believes McLaren only have themselves to blame for the whole they find themselves in. “It has been a horror movie for McLaren with the disqualification in Las Vegas and then the tactical error in Qatar,” he said.
“It only needs a bit of contact, reliability, for any of the three of them and it will turn on its head,” Brundle concluded. McLaren will reflect on their micro management of their drivers, for example in Monza, the Piastri was asked to ceded second place to his team mate due to a faulty wheel gun casting Lando Norris second place during his tyre change.
Based on this alone, McLaren will inevitably try to manipulate the situation in Norris favour, whatever the cost to team harmony and the long 2026 season ahead.
Ferrari boss slammed by Scuderia ambassador for “embarrassing” and “weak excuses”
Having moved to Ferrari this season in a fanfare of Italian PR, Lewis Hamilton has described this year as a “nightmare” and his “worst season ever in Formula One.”
The seven times champion’s year peaked at round two in China, where he qualified on pole for the Sprint before going on to win the shortened for race on Saturday morning. Yet the cruel racing gods intervened, and both Hamilton and his team mate were disqualified from the Grand Prix on Sunday for excessive wear of the SF-25 skid blocks.
Ferrari introduced a new suspension upgrade in Belgium to deal with the ride height issues which plagued their car, yet since the new component their average points scored each weekend has fallen from 19 to 14…. READ MORE
A.J. Hunt is Senior Editor at TJ13, where Andrew oversees editorial standards and contributes to the site’s Formula 1 coverage. A career journalist with experience in both print and digital sports media, Andrew trained in investigative journalism and has written for a range of European sports outlets.
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