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Oscar Piastri says he stands by McLaren’s commitment to letting both its drivers fight for the world championship, even if it weakens their chances against Max Verstappen.
The McLaren driver holds a 13-point lead over team mate Lando Norris heading into the eighth round of the championship. But their rival Verstappen is just nine points behind Norris, and has won more races than anyone bar Piastri.
Last year McLaren won the constructors’ championship while Verstappen took the drivers’ title. Piastri admitted “it is a possibility” that Verstappen could beat them to the drivers’ title this year, even while McLaren take the teams’ title.
However Piastri said both he and Norris want McLaren to give them an equal opportunity to win.
“On both sides of the garage here, we want to win because we’ve been the best driver, the best team, including against the other car in the team,” he told the BBC. “You always want to earn things on merit and you want to be able to beat everyone, including your team mates.
“So that gives Lando and I the best chance of our personal goals of trying to become drivers’ world champion, while also achieving the main result for the team, which is the constructors’ championship.”
Last year, when Norris was striving to overturn Verstappen’s substantial championship lead, McLaren waited until the latter stages of the season before using Piastri to aid his team mate. Piastri won the Hungarian Grand Prix ahead of Norris in July but let him through to win the sprint race at Interlagos four months later.
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Piastri said if either McLaren driver wins the championship this year, they want to know their team mate had the same chance to succeed.
“If we do get beaten by Max, of course that would hurt, but we would know that we both had the same opportunity, we were racing everybody out there and that’s just how it panned out,” he said.
“For us it’s the most straightforward, the fairest way of going racing and that’s what we’ve asked for.”
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