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McLaren is head and shoulders ahead of the competition in Formula One this season. Even four-time World Champion Max Verstappen acknowledged it.
“With the gap that they have, realistically, you don’t really have a big chance,” Verstappen said according to PlanetF1.com.
Verstappen’s statement comes after McLaren secured a 1–2 finish at the Miami Grand Prix, with Oscar Piastri finishing 4.6 seconds ahead of teammate Lando Norris, who was more than 33 seconds clear of third-place George Russell.
McLaren, which snapped a 26-year constructors’ title drought last year, is poised to run away with the championship this year. While only six races have been completed, a quarter of the F1 calendar, Team Papaya has won five of them and holds a 105-point lead in the constructors’ championship over Mercedes (246 to 141).
It’s unclear how much each constructor wins every year—the pool is based on the league’s revenue each year—but the top prize is estimated to be around $140 million and the gap between each position is around $10 million.
Driver Duel
When a team is running away with a constructors’ title like McLaren has, one problem that may surface is a battle between its two drivers. Red Bull did not face this problem during its title run in 2022 and 2023 because of Verstappen’s dominance, but from 2014 to 2016, the early years of Mercedes’ eight-year reign, there was an infamous duel between teammates Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg atop the standings.
McLaren is vulnerable to a close fight between its two drivers, especially since Piastri, a third-year driver, holds a 16-point advantage over Norris, who has been with the team since 2019. But team principal Zac Brown believes there will be no issues between the team’s two young faces.
“They race hard, they race clean, so I know everyone’s waiting for that big moment. I think it’s going to be a bit of a non-event for us internally,” Brown said in April after Piastri supplanted Norris for the championship lead.
Brown added that the team does not favor one driver over the other and that they have “two number ones.”
Both Norris and Piastri have signed deals with McLaren that run until 2028. Piastri inked a multi-year extension in March that RacingNews365 reported to be around $26 million per year, while Norris signed a four-year extension last year, though the financials are unclear.
However, the reality of F1 is that there are loopholes that can allow drivers to become free agents at almost any moment—and teams often search for ways to poach successful drivers away from their rivals.
“[Drivers] all got performance clauses, so a driver who is on a three-year contract, [it] doesn’t really mean anything if they’ve got an exit clause, or the team has an exit clause if the driver doesn’t perform,” Russell admitted last month.
McLaren should at least have its drivers for the rest of this season, and it should hope they can maintain peace and keep their hold of the title, especially considering there’s no guarantee the team maintains its stranglehold over the standings with major regulation changes coming to F1 in 2026.
