McLaren admits there is a risk of Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris repeating the team’s infamous 2007 season with Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton, but believes the upside is worth it.
McLaren has long been committed to treating its two drivers equally and only imposes team orders as a last resort, compared to its main rival Red Bull openly throwing its weight behind one driver - Max Verstappen - for several years.
This caused headaches last year when Piastri raced and beat Norris despite Norris trying to catch Verstappen in the drivers' championship and Piastri being much further adrift.
And as the 2025 championship has become a clear two-way fight between the two McLaren drivers, who are free to race one another wheel-to-wheel and even adopt different strategies, there are obvious risks as two very evenly-matched drivers go head-to-head.
McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown is adamant that having two strong drivers is best for the team even though “we recognise the consequences of that could be 2007”.
That was the year Alonso and Hamilton were team-mates at McLaren and fell out spectacularly, which not only let Kimi Raikkonen steal the drivers’ championship for Ferrari, it drove Alonso out of the team after just one season and led to the Spygate scandal.
Asked by The Race in Hungary about the problems McLaren has created for itself trying to go about racing the right way - by letting its drivers compete and trying to avoid team orders, this year and last - Brown said: “We have our belief system, and we just stick to it. We're comfortable with how we go racing.
“We also know we don't always get it right. We are and always will be, and I think we always have been, a two car team.
“We recognise the consequences of that could be 2007. You got two drivers that tie and lose to Kimi by a point. We could have won that drivers' championship, but who do you pick? And then you run the risk of the guy you don't pick, he's out of here.
“Our drivers are treated equally fairly. There's nothing in their contract that gives one priority over the other, nor have they ever asked for that. They just want fair and equal treatment.
“We know that benefits the team. They accept that, they're cool with that, and we know the risk of that, if you'd like, from a driver point of view, is 2007.
“But I think the downside of favouring one or the other is one then wants to leave, which is exactly what happened at the end of '07 [anyway].
“And you put the constructors’ championship at risk, right? You see other teams favour one, and that kind of is beneficial to the drivers’ championship, but detrimental to the constructors’.
“Both championships are equally important to us.”
Is 2025 anything like 2007?
One obvious distinction between then and now is that the circumstances around the driver line-up are very different.
In 2007, a rookie Hamilton stepped up to F1 to partner two-time world champion Alonso, who had just joined from Renault - and Hamilton had been McLaren’s protege for years. That was a more overt clash.
Now, although Norris is a long-time McLaren protege and has more F1 experience so there is a degree of Piastri being in the ‘outsider’ or ‘newcomer’ role, Norris and Piastri are in their third season as team-mates.
“If it was like year one, it'd be like ‘this rookie has given me a run for my money’,” said Brown when asked if losing this championship would be harder on Norris given he has been in F1 longer.
“But I think now that they're ‘veterans’, it doesn't matter who's been here longer, how long they've been in.
“I think he [Norris] has just got a mindset of, 'I want to win the championship and my team-mate’s my number one competition'. So I don't think it'll be easier or harder for either of them.
“They both can smell the championship, and only one can win it. So I'm sure it'll be hard on the one that doesn't win the championship, assuming the other one does. But I don't think tenure matters now.
“I'm sure Fernando was going ‘Man, this Lewis guy just got here, this is really irritating’.
“But he [Norris] doesn't say anything about that.”
Another key difference to 2007 is that McLaren is in a dominant position in 2025.
Between them Piastri and Norris have won 11 of the 14 races so far in 2025 and are separated by just nine points going into the summer break. Their strong, consistent form in the best car on the grid also means McLaren is in a league of its own in the constructors’ championship with more than double the points of Ferrari.
At the time of the summer break in 2007 - which had six races after it rather than 10 - McLaren had only won six races to Ferrari's five, so things were much closer.
That means there is little to no risk of Verstappen pulling a Raikkonen and stealing the championship because the McLarens get in each other’s way. But where there is some potential for a repeat is a flashpoint as the drivers pursue their own title interests.
McLaren expects more clashes
The two have come close to clashing in wheel-to-wheel combat a couple of times this year, and in the past, but the only actual crash came when Norris misjudged a move on Piastri in Canada and ran into the back of his team-mate - which was instantly defused as Norris took full responsibility.
Apart from that, their rivalry has been characterised by extremely close margins on track and the occasional strategic tension, like in Hungary, where Norris was able to beat Piastri by switching to a one-stop strategy after Piastri was already committed to a conventional two-stop.
Brown, though, believes the two drivers’ relationship is at an all-time high and stronger after that Canada crash because of how it was handled.
“I don't think they'll properly fall out,” said Brown. “Because of the communication, trust and respect we all have, and they have for each other.
“We're very fortunate to have the two personalities that we have. We love the challenge - like, I'm looking forward to them racing each other. So we like it. It's not the elephant in the room. We talk about it.
“We meet every Sunday morning after we've seen how qualifying is going. They know each other's strategy. We're totally transparent. I've said to both of them individually, the windows of opportunity - has your team-mate ever done anything to piss you off? Never. And that's what they both said.
“So there's competitiveness brewing. We’re not feeling any tension. As the championship builds, I'm sure that tension will grow, but like Montreal, I'm glad we got it out of the way, because it was a non-event. Lando owned it. Oscar understood it was a mistake.
“We're fully anticipating them swapping paint again at some point. I'm very confident it won’t be deliberate, which is where you then get into the problems.
“They will have racing incidents in their further time here at McLaren. We know that. They know that. So we're not afraid of that. I'm positive they're never going to run each other off the track, and that's where you get into bad blood.
“It seems like from the outside looking in, when you've seen battles between other team-mates, you’re seeing it brewing, and you kind of go like ‘have they jumped on that, or are they just kind of letting it’?
“We'll take the air out of the balloon right away if we feel like anything's bubbling up. But we've not seen any of it.”
