Oscar Piastri has rejected the ‘villain’ tag put on Zak Brown after allegations by fans that McLaren favoured Lando Norris in the 2025 Formula 1 title fight.
The McLaren drivers fought all season for last year’s title and after 15 rounds Piastri led by 34 points, only for his efforts to collapse across the final nine races as Norris became champion.
But as Piastri’s campaign was unravelling, frustrations arose in Australia with fans claiming that McLaren wanted its champion to be the British driver who had joined its academy as a teenager. Not the Aussie that it prized away from Alpine during the summer of 2022, and there were three separate occasions at the back end of last year that fuelled this fire.
The first was Monza where McLaren ordered Piastri to hand second back to Norris following a slow pitstop. Then in Singapore, the Briton collided into his team-mate mid-overtake and wasn’t told to return the position despite protests from Piastri, who also lost his chance of winning in Qatar due to a strategic blunder – although the team did cost Norris a podium as well.
It consequently led to an Australian politician claiming the week after Qatar that the team is biased against Piastri and cost him the title, which McLaren CEO Brown slammed as “uninformed and uneducated”.
Lando Norris, McLaren, Oscar Piastri, McLaren
Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / LAT Images via Getty Images
That’s because throughout last season, McLaren tried strongly to maintain its papaya rules stance, which gives equal treatment to both drivers and is expected to continue into 2026.
So when the matter was put to Piastri ahead of this weekend’s Melbourne season opener about how Brown became a “villain” in Australia, the 24-year-old said: “My relationship with Zak is very good and I think it’s gotten stronger the longer we’ve known each other as well – he’s certainly good fun and he’s just good to have around.
“I think him and Andrea [Stella] are two people with very different styles that work well together. But no, the relationship between Zak and I is good.
“Obviously, we just as a team, not necessarily Zak and I, had some tough moments through last year as any team has. But I think our relationship’s only gotten stronger from that.”
So Piastri is definitely not going to listen to outside advice, calling for him to reject team orders more often to prevent becoming a number two driver to Norris.
Quite simply, last year the Melbourne native always maintained that doing so would cause harm in the long-term, as the aim is to ensure that he has regular opportunities to fight for the title at McLaren.
Oscar Piastri, McLaren
Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images
The same viewpoint was, and is, held by Norris who has also obeyed team orders on occasions leading to what was an unusually amicable intra-team title fight in 2025.
“We’re always going to race for the best interest of the team,” added Piastri, who late last year even slipped behind Max Verstappen in the championship, the world champion who is a clear number one at Red Bull.
“I think we’ve always had freedom to race for our own individual results as well. Maybe on some occasions we’ve not always made the perfect decision, but I think for me, the important part of that is there’s never been any bad intention with that.
“We’ve had a lot of learning about things we can do differently, things we can do better. But I’ve got nothing to prove. I’m certainly not going to have a rebellious streak or anything like that.
“I think a pretty quick-fire way to make sure you’re not going to win a championship is to go against your own team. I don’t think that’s a very wise move, but yeah, definitely we’ve had discussions and worked on things we can do better this year.”
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– The Motorsport.com Team