The team have already won the constructors’ title for the second year in a row but have not won both championships in the same year since 1998.
McLaren chief executive Zak Brown said the team would rather lose the championship by a point than favour one of their drivers against Red Bull’s Verstappen.
Max Verstappen is closing in on the leaders.Credit: Getty Images
Verstappen, chasing his fifth title in a row, is 36 points off the pace and closing in after slashing the gap from 104 at the end of August while McLaren’s pair have taken points from each other.
The Dutch driver’s return to contention has reminded some of the 2007 season won by Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen, who finished strongly and ended up beating McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso by one point.
“We’re well aware of 2007,” Brown told Formula One’s Beyond the Grid podcast on Thursday. “But we’ve got two drivers who want to win the world championship. We’re playing offence; we’re not playing defence.
“I’d rather go ‘We did the best we can and our drivers tied on points and the other guy beat us by one’ than the alternative.
Piastri is interviewed by Sky’s David Croft at Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace.Credit: Getty Images
“Which is telling one of our drivers right now, when they’re one point away from each other, ‘I know you have a dream to win the world championship, but we flipped a coin and you don’t get to do it this year’. Forget it. That’s not how we go racing.”
Norris has beaten Piastri in the past five races, a situation that has fuelled the conspiracy theories.
Jos Verstappen, himself an ex-F1 racer, stirred the pot by telling Dutch media that Piastri should stand up for himself.
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“I find it quite strange what’s happening at McLaren,” Verstappen told Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf. “Piastri can’t have suddenly forgotten how to drive, right? If I were him, or his manager [Mark Webber], I’d bang my fist on the table internally at least once.”
“Because right now everyone is wondering whether he can handle the pressure – and that’s not good for your reputation. Piastri’s reputation in this case.”
But Piastri told reporters he was quite capable of making his point.
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“We’re always very open with each other in terms of what we think, whether we think things have been fair, whether we think the right decisions have been made,” he said. “I respect the team allowing us to both try and fight for the drivers’ championship.”
He also said his recent troubles, including a double DNF for McLaren in the sprint in Texas, could be turned around.
“Austin and Mexico have been kind of two races that have been different to a lot of others. There were clearly some things that were just requiring very different driving, for whatever reason. So I think those two are similar,” Piastri said.
“But I don’t think any of the races before that were bad or catastrophic. There were some mistakes here and there, but learning from the last two weekends has been important.”
Verstappen is effectively a one-man team at Red Bull, his points making up 321 of their 20-race total of 346, and does not have to worry about Japanese teammate Yuki Tsunoda taking anything from him.
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