With F1 title in the balance, is it time for McLaren to prioritize Norris over Piastri?

With the shadow of Max Verstappen now looming larger than ever, McLaren's double disqualification in Las Vegas will have revived a question that has dogged McLaren throughout the "Papaya rules" era: is it time to back one driver over the other to win the title? Verstappen's big win on the casino-lined roads of Sin City initially looked to have simply kept him in Formula 1's championship fight, but McLaren's technical violation that followed moved Verstappen right into the rearview mirror.

That is nightmare fuel for a team that all year long has had to live with the nagging voice in the back of its head that maybe, just maybe, it is about to repeat the events of 2007 and have two battling teammates hand the drivers' championship to another team on a silver platter. Vegas has made that prospect feel more real than ever, even if Lando Norris should still be viewed as a fairly comfortable favorite.

Norris goes into the Qatar Grand Prix, a sprint weekend with 33 points available, 24 points ahead of both Verstappen and McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri. Norris can win the title by finishing third at all three of the remaining races: Qatar's sprint on Saturday, Qatar's main race on Sunday and the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix on Dec. 7. He can secure the title by outscoring Verstapen and Piastri by two points over the course of the weekend. Still, this is Verstappen, the four-time defending champion that we're talking about here -- the idea it will be easy is fanciful.

The dramatic events of Sunday's early hours in Nevada have raised an obvious question: Is this now, finally, the time to favor Norris over Piastri to make absolutely sure a McLaren driver emerges from 2025 as champion? Critics of the team might follow up with another: Isn't the current situation proof that it should have been doing that all along?

A fair fight

While the three-way fight we now have on our hands has been largely down to Verstappen's mesmerizing form down the stretch, the door has been left wide open by McLaren's commitment to the philosophy of letting its drivers race as freely and fairly as the team's own racing guidelines will allow. As it goes to Qatar, McLaren has won 13 races to Red Bull's six, but those have been split as seven for Norris and six for Piastri, while all six of Red Bull's have come from Verstappen.

On paper, it looks like a slam-dunk case that the team should have implemented team orders earlier in the season to back one over the other. The reality is far less simple. Firstly, the idea of backing one of the team's drivers over another flies in the face of how McLaren CEO Zak Brown thinks a drivers' championship should be won.

"We're playing offense, we're not playing defense," Brown told the "Beyond the Grid" podcast last month. "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, 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."

The memory of McLaren's 2007 campaign is repeatedly thrown at Brown when he's asked to explain his philosophy. It's the year Fernando Alonso, at the time the reigning back-to-back world champion, and rookie Lewis Hamilton's championship battle allowed Kimi Rikknen to swoop in and win the title at the finale in Brazil. In the same interview, Brown insisted he does not care if 2025 goes down the same path.

"In the event that 2007 happens again, I'd rather have that outcome than all the others by playing favorites," he said. "We don't do it. We're racers and we're going racing."

The 2007 example is an interesting one as the disharmony between drivers existed because team orders were not implemented, while harmony exists this year for the same reason. While he was largely vilified at the time, Alonso's frustrations with how McLaren executed the 2007 season were vindicated to some degree by how that championship eventually ended. His primary gripe was that the team should have backed him over the rookie Hamilton, and when they did not do that, his relationship with Brown's predecessor, Ron Dennis, crumbled. Without the benefit of hindsight of knowing what Hamilton became, Alonso's frustration at that time was perfectly understandable.

There's a better case to be made that the McLaren of 2007 should have implemented team orders than there is in 2025, for the exact point Brown made: He's got two drivers going for their first championship this year, rather than the reigning champion and a hotshot rookie. Asking one to back the other would have effectively set the hierarchy between them going forward. Even last year, Piastri was only asked to help Norris win the title when he was mathematically out of it, and Norris moved over to repay the favor for Piastri at the end of the Qatar sprint race 12 months ago (by which time Verstappen had already beaten him to the drivers' title).

Brown's philosophy is shared by the man with whom he has rebuilt McLaren into the grid's dominant force: team principal Andrea Stella. That is perhaps not surprising giving his own career history.

Stella worked at the Michael Schumacher-era Ferrari teams and beyond, and not only saw how team orders could create a toxic atmosphere internally, but also how deeply they unsettled first Rubens Barrichello and then Felipe Massa. At the 2010 German Grand Prix, Stella was Alonso's race engineer at Ferrari when his counterpart Rob Smedley delivered the infamous "Fernando is faster than you; please confirm you understood this message" line to Massa. It was arguably the most talked-about team order ever given to a driver. Massa has since said it did more damage to him mentally than the near-fatal crash at the Hungarian Grand Prix 12 months prior, and he never won another race.

Stella lived through those days and has been determined not to repeat those mistakes as team boss for McLaren.

Could McLaren have avoided this scenario?

It could have, but hindsight is always 20/20. McLaren did not know over the August break that Red Bull's Italian Grand Prix upgrade would turn its car into bonafide race-winning machine overnight. It couldn't have known it would lose second and fifth at the Las Vegas Grand Prix for a technical infraction measuring the equivalent of a hair's width.

Implementing team orders always sounds like an easy call, but in actuality, it can be just as tricky as walking the "Papaya rules" tightrope McLaren has tiptoed for more than a year now. Let's say for argument's sake that the team had decided after Norris' car failure at the Dutch Grand Prix that Piastri was the man to back instead of Norris; Brown & Co. might be kicking themselves now had they done that, given how the Australian's form has dropped off.

Backing one driver over the other earlier in the season likely would have meant Piastri getting the nod over Norris, given how long he held the lead of the championship. Since winning at Zandvoort, Piastri has given up a 34-point lead to Norris and a staggering 104-point lead to Verstappen. Imagine the headlines instead if McLaren had given one driver priority over the other, only to see the form of the team's chosen contender wobble down the stretch. There might have been a nagging feeling something like this could happen anyway: across their two previous seasons as teammates Piastri's form was weaker in the final months of the season than Norris', largely owing to his struggles on low-grip circuits like Austin and Mexico City.

In that timeline, we could be looking at a scenario where McLaren strengthened Verstappen's position by putting all its eggs in the wrong basket. Sometimes giving yourself two different chances to win can be the best option.

An example close to Piastri would justifies Brown's approach here too. Piastri's manager Mark Webber was part of a legendary title showdown in 2010, and although he became synonymous with the unfairness of team hierarchies and orders -- largely thanks to his "not bad for a No. 2 driver" victory message at Silverstone in 2010 and the infamous Multi-21 incident at Malaysia 2013 -- there is another example that's often overlooked.

Webber had arrived at that Abu Dhabi climax annoyed that Red Bull had not implemented team orders to allow him to beat teammate Sebastian Vettel to victory in Brazil at the previous race. Doing so would have put Webber one point behind Alonso going to Abu Dhabi, but it would have all but eliminated Vettel from meaningful contention.

As it turned out, Red Bull's decision was absolutely the right call. Alonso's chances were undone when Ferrari's pit wall panicked and followed Webber's Red Bull into an early pit stop, sacrificing track position in the process. It would cost both the championship. Vettel won the race and the title, a result that would not have been enough had he moved over for Webber at the previous race. By not putting all its eggs into one basket, Red Bull had given itself a double chance of winning the title, which it managed.

Will McLaren implement them now?

We can't know for certain what McLaren will say until its drivers speak to the media on Thursday, but it's easy to guess. Asking Piastri to back up Norris' championship now is surely unfathomable given how the season has gone to this point. Even if it is hard to imagine, it surely has to be considered, especially if the race plays out in a bizarre way on Sunday.

Brown and Stella have never shown any sign they will deviate from their stated philosophy, and doing so now would smack of panic in the face of Verstappen's current position in the championship. Different scenarios must be echoing around both their minds. What if Norris and Piastri collide again, like they did in the Austin sprint? What if Norris' car is due another failure in Abu Dhabi, like the one he had in Zandvoort? Surely letting Verstappen still be in the hunt next week is the last thing the team can do given how often F1 title showdowns tend to unfold in dramatic and unpredictable ways.

Then there's performance to consider. While Qatar is expected to be a circuit that suits McLaren, it is also possible the team will be forced to sacrifice some performance with a conservative setup that avoids any chance of a repeat of the plank issue that cost them so dearly in Nevada. That essentially came from running the ride height too close to the ground in a bid to optimize the car. On a sprint weekend, with two chances at points, the risk of falling foul of the regulations is even higher.

Can the team really risk Verstappen being closer than he is now in Abu Dhabi? Let's also not forget that with 33 points on offer across two days in Qatar, there's a scenario in which Verstappen could go into the championship finale with the title lead -- it's unlikely, but in a year as unpredictable as this, the only thing thing has been predictable has been the regularity of Verstappen's brilliance.

Brown is clearly sincere in how he wants to win a championship, but it would be human to start second guessing that viewpoint when the reality of not winning the drivers' title is now so tantalizing. He will know there's no world championship trophy for trying to win things the right way. There's no Wikipedia page listing all the drivers and teams who could claim a moral victory in the title fight.