Seven Tenths of a Second, page 15
That’s not how I want to lead at McLaren. And to be fair to Ron and Monsour, who ran McLaren for so long, that’s not the way they wanted to do things either. That kind of unfairness, that stifling of competition, is not part of our company ethos.
We have reached a stage in the team again now where we have two superb, elite drivers in Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, who are both capable of winning the world drivers’ title and who are in their third season of fighting each other to try and achieve that.
I’ve known Lando a lot longer than I’ve known Oscar. We start to try and recruit Lando when he is in the junior formulas. He’s one of those drivers that you know has got something special the first time you see him drive. You put him in a car and he is super-fast straight away. He has got a scary amount of natural talent.
Drivers as special as him, they don’t know a series, they don’t know some tracks, they haven’t had a lot of time in the car, and then they go and beat everyone who knows the cars and knows the tracks. Lando has done that in pretty much every single series he’s raced in.
He is a very shy kid when I first get to know him and there is a time when I introduce him to Ron, before I’m at McLaren, and Ron isn’t sure that Lando has what it takes to make it in F1.
He is relatively small in stature and there are concerns that perhaps he is not going to develop the necessary muscles and strength to make it at the very highest level, but he matures so much and works so hard that those doubts disappear. And he has a great management team in Mark Berryman and Fraser Sheader, who have looked after his career since he was in karts.
Lando’s from a great family, too. I think it was Sir Alex Ferguson who talked often about signing players for their character as well as their talent and I’m a big believer in that. Lando’s a shining example of the worth of that policy.
Family tells you a lot about someone’s character and how they were raised. It doesn’t mean you want everyone to be the same, but you do want them to have the same goodness in their heart.
And then there’s the talent. When Lando gets to the edges of Formula 1 and we start to put him in the free practice sessions, he is unfazed by it. He goes up against Stoffel Vandoorne, one of our two main drivers, a couple of times in 2018 and is quicker than him.
Then we decide to give him a go against Fernando Alonso at Monza, in free practice at the Italian Grand Prix that summer. They’re trading fastest laps and Lando is about ready to do his last run, with Fernando having done the fastest run.
So we say to Fernando: ‘Hey, Lando is on his final run now so just don’t get in his way.’ First sector, Lando matches Fernando’s time. Second sector, he is a tiny bit quicker. Third sector, it’s looking like Lando’s going to get him.
All of a sudden, Lando comes on the radio. ‘Fernando blocked me,’ he says. And then Fernando comes on: ‘Yeah, sorry, I didn’t see him,’ he says. Everyone in the garage bursts out laughing. That’s Lando’s welcome to Formula 1.
After that, I put Lando in the 24 Hours of Daytona with Fernando. Neither of them knows the car and neither of them knows the team and Lando is every bit as good as Fernando. And Fernando is one of the best racing drivers in the world, ever. There’s a lot of evidence that tells you Lando is special.
And then Oscar comes into the team at the start of the 2023 season. He also wins everything he races in. First in Formula Renault. First in Formula 3. First in Formula 2. And now, after two seasons in F1, he’s going wheel-to-wheel with Lando.
He’s a great kid, too. I get to know him later in his career. His talent has already been identified by Alpine and so we know he has the class and the temperament.
He is a harder person to get to know initially because he’s a bit introverted, and that’s one of his great strengths because he’s so level and calm. His family comes to all the races and his mom and dad are awesome.
You can get racing families that support but also interfere. Oscar’s family doesn’t interfere. They just support. And at the end of the weekend, I’ll see his dad, Chris, and it’ll be Sunday and the race will be over and it’ll be the first time I’ve seen him all weekend. So I’ll say: ‘Hey, Chris, when did you get here?’ And it’ll turn out he’s been here all weekend. He just hasn’t felt the need to make a thing of it.
If I say Oscar’s flat-lined, that’s a compliment. He deals with pressure and all the stuff that goes on around the periphery of Formula 1 extremely well. He’s a very impressive young man. He moves from Australia when he’s young and he has to become independent early on. He has to get on with it. It is a bit like my upbringing.
He’s been managed and mentored by Mark and Ann Webber, who are both massively experienced and add a lot of value. In his own racing career, Mark’s a driver who knows how to win and he has done a great job in taking care of Oscar.
Oscar’s a bit of a one-man band, so he just kind of keeps his head down and gets on with his job. You wouldn’t want to have two Oscars or two Landos. Just like you wouldn’t want two Andreas or two Zaks. Variety’s a good thing and we have got two great guys who are immensely talented.
We are comfortable taking a risk on Oscar when we bring him in at the start of 2023 because we have Lando and he is already proven. Before that, we are comfortable taking a risk on Lando because we have Carlos Sainz. You never want to take two risks at the same time.
We feel we’re in a good position. We’ve got two young guys, two good guys who complement each other, two guys who drive a little bit differently, which benefits both of them. They’re not a million miles apart, but they drive differently enough that they learn from each other.
Our policy at McLaren, as everyone knows, is that we operate with two number-one drivers. We do not discriminate. We do not favour one above the other. We do not prioritize the title claims of one above the other.
That’s how we come into each racing season, and only when and if it becomes clear that the team effort needs to go behind one driver or the other would we consider changing our approach. Drivers that drive for us know that they are driving for the team first.
We’ve taken our share of criticism for that over the last couple of years. Midway through the 2024 season, in particular, we’re accused of harming Lando’s drivers’ title aspirations and the team’s ambitions of winning the constructors’ championship by sticking to the ethics we believe in.
Look, we make a couple of mistakes as a team around the midpoint of that season. At the Hungarian Grand Prix in Budapest, Oscar is leading but our pit-stop strategy gives Lando the lead and we have to ask him to relinquish it.
It’s the fair thing to do and Lando does the fair thing because he is a team player but it still leads to suggestions our strategy is confused. ‘Who gets priority on race weekend?’ Claire Williams, the former Williams deputy team principal, asks on Drive to Survive. ‘Zak has to stamp his authority on this.’
I don’t agree. No one has to have priority. I have faith in our team and all the people who work for it, and it is not beyond our compass to cater for both drivers equally. Later in that season, we prioritize Lando for a while because it is clear he has a better shot at the drivers’ title. That’s common sense. It doesn’t change our principles and Oscar understands, accepts and supports the strategy. Some people say it’s too late, but we don’t do it any earlier than that because Oscar is never more than a win away from parity.
If we do it earlier, we might as well have a number-one driver and a number-two driver. And if we do that, then it might be that we wouldn’t be able to extend Oscar’s contract because a driver of his talent is not going to accept being a number two.
The issue of whether to nominate a favoured driver, either officially or unofficially, is loaded for a lot of people. It’s an easy touchpoint. It’s a convenient stick to beat a team with if things go wrong. You are damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Sometimes, people seem to forget there are two championships. The public mind prioritizes the drivers’ title. That’s not always the case within the sport. Ironically, given Claire’s comments, the Williams team in its heyday in the 80s and 90s is very much about winning the constructors’ championship above all.
That is the prize they covet. And they manage their drivers accordingly. Nigel Mansell wins the drivers’ title for them in 1992 and is gone at the end of the season. Alain Prost wins the drivers’ title in 1993 and is gone at the end of the season. Damon Hill wins the drivers’ title in 1996 and is gone at the end of the season.
My view is that both championships are super-important. We get paid for winning the constructors’ championship. And the best way to win the constructors’ title is to be first and second in the drivers’ championship. So by giving both drivers equal opportunity, you’re actually enhancing your chances at the constructors’.
If you look at Red Bull in the 2025 season and the seasons that immediately precede it, they favour one driver. They favour Max. And, as we speak, they’re fourth in the constructors’ championship. They finish third in 2024. They win the drivers’ title but lose the constructors’.
Both Lando and Oscar want to beat all of the nineteen other drivers fairly. That includes their teammate. And that’s always been McLaren’s philosophy, which I fully support. It’s one of the things I’ve always loved about McLaren. It’s one of the things that makes McLaren my favourite F1 team when I am a teenager.
And the reality is, we try and give them a good enough car where they can decide between them who’s champion.
It’s not just McLaren that chooses a fairer system. Ferrari runs with equal number ones. I don’t think it favours Lewis or Charles, but everyone’s excited for the tussle.
We’re open, we’re transparent, we talk to the drivers if we have an incident between them, which we haven’t really. We talk about it and we talk about the elephant in the room. I know that, sooner or later, they will crash into each other and then we will explore exactly what happened and we will be criticized again, but we won’t change our principles.
The thing is, I don’t think our guys will run each other off the track. They’ll race each other hard and maybe one of them might make a mistake. It happens. And, yes, it happens in Montreal this season at the Canadian Grand Prix in June when Lando runs into Oscar. It’s racing. But I don’t see them driving their teammate off the track, because there’ll be consequences for them if they do.
They drive for us, so if they try that, they’ll find that they lose support from us. That doesn’t necessarily mean one of them will be fired. That would be extreme. But there will be repercussions.
Fortunately, we haven’t had to do anything like that and we don’t intend to. The drivers are clear on what the team expects and they know there will be consequences for not racing in line with the papaya rules.
I’d rather have that challenge, the challenge of trying to manage fair competition between two brilliant drivers. I don’t even want to call it a problem because it’s not a problem. I’d rather have that challenge than the issue of having one driver in first and the other qualifying nineteenth and being fourth in the constructors’ championship. That’s a problem.
At the other end of the spectrum, there’s the old Williams model I mentioned where there is a very high focus on the constructors’ championship and they don’t hesitate to change drivers even if they have just won the drivers’ championship.
The McLaren way is that we care about both. I’m not saying it’s easy, and now and again you may get a situation like 2007 where Lewis and Fernando, McLaren teammates, tie in joint second place at the end of the season and Kimi Raikkonen wins the title by one point.
Maybe if McLaren had favoured one driver that year, he would have won the title. Here’s the tricky part, though. Which one would you favour? Our way is a third way, which is that we want to win both championships and we know that that comes with risk, but we are all about the purity of competition.
This is a team sport and you have got twenty drivers that all want to win the world championship, and we’ve got two and they both want to win the world championship. So we’re going to support them until there comes a point where it’s clear you should throw your support behind one if he has a better shot at the title.
And if that decision means you end up with two drivers tied at the end of the year and you lose the drivers’ championship, at least we can say we treated both drivers fairly and equally and we give it another go next year.
If you have an idea in your head that one of them is better than the other, then maybe you would favour the faster guy. But I don’t have that idea. They’re evenly matched. They couldn’t be any closer. As I write this midway through the 2025 season, it’s even money on which of them could win the title this year.
I understand, too, that pursuing a fair strategy with both drivers can sometimes lead to them being accused of not being single-minded enough. In Budapest in 2024, we are very conservative about protecting ourselves from the car behind us so we pit Lando first. That gives him the undercut, which means he is likely to come out in front, even though normally we would have pitted Oscar first. We ask Lando to swap places and some say he’s weak because he agrees, but that is always the arrangement.
Look, that’s Formula 1. Other team owners try and gain an advantage by dripping poison in people’s ears. It’s normal. Drive to Survive shows Lando letting Oscar past and Christian Horner watching. And Christian says: ‘I guarantee you Max would not have swapped.’ I would never want an environment where we as a team don’t feel an instruction we give to a driver will be followed through, and certainly would never be intimidated by a driver or any other team member for that matter.
But there’s a reason why we have the two drivers that we have. Lando’s a good guy, an honest guy, and I know he’ll move over for Oscar because he has high integrity. There’s nothing wrong with that. He’s not always a nice guy on the track. He’s been very aggressive on track.
Yeah, I don’t think Lando is a guy who wants to win a world championship by driving people off the track. Some people might see that as weak. I don’t. We’ve got a saying at McLaren that it’s not only what you do in achieving the best results, but it’s how you do it.
And we want to win with class and dignity. So I think you can look at every sport and you’ve got good champions and bad champions, and if you want to be a good champion you might miss that championship because you weren’t prepared to be a bad champion.
I think that’s a great quality in sport. People look at how loved Rafael Nadal is, or Roger Federer or Novak Djokovic, and they are the real greats of the game, who want to win Grand Slams the right way.
If the naysayers or the shit-stirrers, which in the case of Formula 1 is some of the other teams, want to portray fair play as a weakness, that’s just a fairly dull attempt at psychological warfare.
We wouldn’t want to win a championship by running someone off the road or by cheating with our car. We want to win the right way. We’d rather lose the right way than win the wrong way.
I think we have the best driver line-up in Formula 1 and I would not change it. Andrea Stella and I spend a lot of time with our drivers, but we’re consistent and what we don’t want to do is add anxiety.
We’re level with them. We’re always talking to them. The good days, the bad days, the fun days, the frustrating days. We try and remain level. I don’t want to draw negative energy and so sometimes I do try and use humour.
Andrea motivates in a different way. I’m the kind of person to try and get the guys to have a good laugh, to take some edge out. Not that there is an edge between them, but they’re one and two in the world championship, so they’re naturally competitive with each other.
I can tell when they’re getting wound tight and so I’ll deploy different tactics, but I do that consistently so they’re comfortable with it as opposed to doing something that’s kind of out of left field.
When Lando needs a bit of a boost, I can get him to tear up in laughter and I know I’ve got him in a good place. I’m like a disruptive kid with Lando. The stuff I say to him doesn’t get on Netflix.
I’m trying to shock him because he’s still quite a shy guy, so I try to be a bit of a big brother. It’s a different approach with Oscar. With Oscar you have more of a business conversation.
Lando wears his heart on his sleeve a little bit more. So you interact with him in a different way. I take that same philosophy with all the team and employees: how do you get people in a good frame of mind so they work at their best?
I have the utmost respect for both our drivers. Do they want to beat each other? They want to beat each other more than anyone else on the track. Make no mistake about it. I’ve been there. You come in, the first thing you do is ask where your teammate is in the lap times.
Where’s your teammate? Lemme see my teammate’s data. So that desire to beat each other is only going to go up, but I think it can be managed in a productive, healthy, competitive way.
That includes when they have a coming-together. We have always said we know they will probably collide at some point. They are racers. The law of averages says it’s going to happen. And it duly happens in the closing stages of the race in Montreal. It doesn’t change our thinking about our philosophy one iota.
If you’re going to have two teammates collide, what happens in Canada is actually the perfect scenario, right? Lando’s trying to pass Oscar for fourth place with four laps to go and he misjudges it and runs into the back of him and has to retire.
It’s clearly Lando’s fault. He only takes himself out. Oscar finishes the race in the same position. It doesn’t cost him anything. Lando only hurts his own chances and costs us a few points in the constructors’ championship. And then he owns it straight away.
I like how he deals with it. Even before he gets out of the car, he’s apologizing. ‘Our rule number one is to not make contact with your teammate,’ Lando tells the media, ‘and it’s what I did.
