This year's Formula 1 world championship fight looks increasingly more like it's going to be an all-McLaren battle between Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri after the last few grands prix.
That's inevitably going to put stress on the team and require some careful management.
Over the years, we have seen many team-mate match-ups that didn't really work out - Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost at McLaren, Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber at Red Bull, Nelson Piquet and Nigel Mansell at Williams, to name but a few.
But if a team was bold enough to have a defined number one and the drivers bought into it like Ferrari did through the Michael Schumacher glory years then there was no discussion.
As far as my own experience is concerned, when we had two drivers of equal talent or at the same period in their careers, we would usually have fireworks of some sort or another. To add even more confusion to that scenario, usually one of them was coming with substantial sponsorship.
At Jordan when we ran Rubens Barrichello and Eddie Irvine, or Giancarlo Fisichella and Ralf Schumacher, there were times when managing these pairings was like walking on glass. If they were ever racing close to each other then anything could happen, and usually did.
Norris and Piastri have so far kept it clean in their battles this season, but as history tells us it's usually only a matter of time before team-mates fighting for the world championship come to blows. How McLaren deals with that situation will decide whether the fallout will be contained, or it develops into an all-out war.
There have only been minor flashpoints so far, such as the team orders that called off Piastri's charge around the first pitstops in Australia, or Piastri's complaint of his team-mate being "cheeky" over the radio when Norris put himself into a position to grab a tow on the first Q3 runs in Spain. But both Zak Brown and Andrea Stella are very open about admitting they expect their drivers to clash on track at some point.
I think it's great to let them race and as long as they respect that the team is bigger than either of them then all's fair in love, war and F1. Incidents and accidents will always happen and I am sure they will have a coming together at some point in the season. You simply can't race that close to each other for so long for that not to happen.
However, the first time the red mist sets in for either of them then the team will have to also step in.
I'm sure these types of conversations come up frequently, but there's a time and a place for it to crop up and it's not Sunday morning in pre-race meetings. The drivers need to have a clear mind and know what they can and cannot do.
When you head down into the first corner, there are potentially six, if not more, other cars to keep an eye out for so it's not just about being gentlemanly with your team-mate. You have to keep your own nose clean as any car damage would normally mean race over, or at least a lot less points than you were expecting to score.
At McLaren, I would say Piastri is more at ease with the situation. He is very laid back about it all, but inside there is the killer instinct that you need to have if you are to be successful in F1.
As for Norris, he seems to get a bit more flustered when things don't pan out as planned. He has allowed small mistakes that might have lost him one position to turn into a much bigger problem.
We're not talking about a one man band here. Both drivers will have their engineering group of probably four people, then eight or ten mechanics working on their car, so yes the ultimate decision in that few milliseconds is down to the driver, but all those back-up personnel want to beat everyone else and that includes whoever is on the other side of the garage.
There's also little things like who does the management prioritise when they speak to the drivers? If it gets too blatantly obvious then the drivers notice it and react to it.
An example was when Piastri's manager Webber was driving for Red Bull against Vettel. That management group backed Vettel, and there was no reason not to as he was very worthy of it, but these sort of things just niggle away at a driver mentally. Vettel was that unnamed number one, so Webber will be very conscious not to allow a comparable situation to happen at McLaren for Piastri.
McLaren has got a clear advantage at the moment. However, those moments can be shortlived so you need to make sure the team comes away from each weekend with as many points as possible. From there on in, it's down to each driver to maximise their own performance. If they can do that then one of them will become drivers' world champion.
To manage this situation, everyone needs to be honest with each other and not hold anything back. If you think that Norris and/or his engineer was up to something that wasn't discussed when he tried to get a small tow at Barcelona then bring it into the open. I agree 100% with Stella's comments on the subject: bring everything out into the open and hold nothing back.
That's the only way to manage such situations, and even then it's difficult. But I'd say McLaren definitely has the right approach, it just needs to remember that you don't always get a second chance.
