McLaren are in a difficult position with their intra-team title fight.

Martin Brundle believes that McLaren’s management is ‘doomed to fail’, predicting that the relationship between Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri will eventually turn sour. Andrea Stella’s squad have prioritised ‘fairness and equality’ above all else this season, creating some awkward situations in the process.

In Singapore last time out, Max Verstappen closed the gap to Piastri to 63 points after beating both McLaren drivers. However, the real drama occurred between the team-mates as Norris bumped wheels with his title rival on lap one as they tussled over third place.

That fight left Piastri enraged on the radio, and upon arriving in Austin for the United States Grand Prix, the McLaren duo revealed that, following an internal review, Norris would be carrying sporting “repercussions” throughout the remaining six rounds of the 2025 campaign.

This marked another layer of complexity added to the already tangled web of driver management at McLaren. All the while, Verstappen applied a little more pressure, beating both Piastri and Norris to pole for the sprint race at the Circuit of the Americas.

“In many respects, this set-up is doomed to fail. You have got two supremely competitive athletes working in a team environment. It’s always going to go wrong, it’s just a question of how the teams handle it.”

Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris crashed in the sprint on Saturday (Image: Getty)

Despite going public with the decision to burden Norris with sporting repercussions, all members of the McLaren camp neglected to reveal the specifics of the punishment, so as not to offer their rivals – most notably Verstappen – a minor advantage over the coming races.

However, offering his theory, Brundle continued: “It’s slightly odd here because I think what McLaren are doing is actually for the sport very good. They can race from lights out to the chequered flag with one proviso: don’t run into each other.

“There are then obviously these consequences [if they clash]. If it hadn’t been Piastri alongside him, the team would have cheered those first few corners for Lando; they were actually brilliantly driven, he happened to just touch his team-mate.

“If we were in a development race, I think it would be, for example, Oscar would get the new parts first. Something like that. Or, if it’s a slipstream track where you need a slipstream in qualifying, Oscar would get priority on that. It will be that kind of intra-team thing that doesn’t hand advantage to other teams.”