SAO PAULO — McLaren would rather miss out on the Formula One world championship by a point than favour one of their drivers against Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, according to the team’s chief executive Zak Brown.
McLaren’s Lando Norris leads Australian teammate Oscar Piastri by a point in the standings with four rounds, including Sunday’s Sao Paulo Grand Prix and sprint, remaining.
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 off 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 said according to Reuters. “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,” he added.
“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 last five races, a situation that has already led to online conspiracy theories about McLaren potentially favouring the Briton at the Australian’s expense.
Brown said the best way to win the constructors’ title, which McLaren clinched last month for the second year in a row, was for the drivers to finish first and second.
The best way to win the drivers’ championship, he added, was to have two drivers going for the title.
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 off him.
Brown said he wanted to make sure that if Verstappen were to win, it was down to him beating McLaren rather than the team beating themselves.
“In the event 2007 happens again, I’d rather have that outcome than all the other outcomes by playing favourites,” he added. “We won’t do it. We’re racers, we’re going racing.”
Gabriel Bortoleto, meanwhile, is keeping expectations in check as he prepares for a first home Formula One outing in Brazil at a track he has only raced on once before in a stock car event.
The 21-year-old Sauber rookie, who will be the first Brazilian to start a grand prix at Sao Paulo’s atmospheric Interlagos circuit since Felipe Massa in 2017, said he would seek to treat it like any other race.
“I won’t lie, there’s obviously more expectation, more anxiety from all sides. But, at the end of the day, it’s a race that offers the same number of points,” Bortoleto told reporters. “I want to treat it the same way and just do my best.
“The expectation will always be there, but it won’t change the final result. So, the important thing is for us to give our best, prepare for the weekend as best we can, and do our job on the track,” he added.
The Brazilian, who won the Formula Two championship last year after clinching the Formula Three title the season before, spent much of his career in Europe and acknowledged his limited experience of the Sao Paulo track.
“It’s kind of a new track for me,” said the rookie, whose previous race there was a 2022 stock car event.
