McLaren will ask Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri how they want the team to celebrate when one of them wins the Formula 1 drivers' title this season, so the losing competitor is factored into how it is handled.
Piastri leads Norris by nine points at the summer break with the next-best driver, Max Verstappen, 97 points off the lead. The championship has gradually become a straight fight between the two McLaren drivers, who have won 11 of the 14 grands prix so far.
McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown claimed "we still think others are in the championship" but added "we are not naive", so the team is aware that it is balancing a delicate situation between two evenly-matched team-mates who are fighting each other directly for a first title.
There has not been a conversation yet on how to handle the losing driver but when asked by The Race what the plan is for that, Brown revealed the intention is to work it out with Norris and Piastri directly and ask what they think.
Brown said: "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?'.
"That's the way we think. It comes back to thinking about our people."
McLaren went into the summer break with four straight 1-2 finishes in grands prix: three victories for Norris, one for Piastri.
Two of those Norris wins were particularly disappointing for Piastri as one came at Silverstone, where Piastri lost out because of a controversial penalty he and McLaren disputed, and the other was in Hungary where Norris switched to a one-stop strategy after falling back early on and made it work.
They were glimpses of how McLaren's situation gives the team an awkward balance to find in reacting to races that end in particularly contrasting emotions for its drivers - more so as the races tick by, and each points swing carries more emotional weight.
Brown, who was speaking ahead of the Hungarian GP, cited the Silverstone one as a specific example because of how disappointed Piastri was there.
"Clearly, he was upset. Understandable," said Brown. "And I tend to get - which is going to surprise all of you! - some stuff from social media, from fans.
"I got one note in particular, which was pretty off the charts. And so I'm walking with Oscar to the fanzone, and I was like, ‘Dude, you didn't have to send me this note'! Because it was a pretty aggressive note from an Oscar fan. And I got a giggle out of him.
"And I was like, ‘All right, good. We're just starting to kind of break the ice'.
"I'm a believer in dealing with stuff in the moment, if you can fix it in the moment - or if it's something that you can't fix in the moment, maybe you need to just let everyone cool down and deal with it on Monday. Maybe let's just let everyone take the temperature down.
"I always try and break the ice. Kind of goof around a little bit with the drivers. So when I got the chuckle out of Oscar, it was like, ‘All right, good, we're in the calming down phase', right?
"That's understanding the people here. But we have thought about it, I've thought about how do you deal with the winner and the loser, if you'd like.
"And that'll just be a conversation we have with the drivers and go, ‘How would you like us to conduct ourselves?' Because we'll be very considerate about that approach."
McLaren is committed to giving both drivers equal opportunity in this fight rather than have a number one/number two driver, and also give them freedom to race wheel-to-wheel and go in different strategic directions - despite all of that leading to inevitable complications when the two are so closely matched.
Piastri has six wins to Norris's five, they are level on four poles, and equal on podiums too with 12 apiece. The only area where there is a clear distinction is in how long each has led for - Piastri has led 1093 miles this season, Norris ‘only' 650 miles.
"It's going to come down to execution," said Brown. "It's clear, from a pace point of view, there's nothing in it.
"So, it's going to come down to consistency of execution – or it could come down to luck of the draw: weather, safety car, or one guy gets wiped out by someone else on the track."
