‘It’s all above board’: Piastri’s ex-trainer swats away McLaren favouritism chatter as title tide turns
The internet loves a theory, and Oscar Piastri’s late-season wobble has given it plenty of fuel. But Kim Keedle, Piastri’s trainer up to the end of last year, is having none of it.
After the Dutch Grand Prix — Round 15 of 24 — Piastri sat 34 points clear of Lando Norris at the top of the standings. Five races without a podium later, the Australian finds himself 24 behind with three Grands Prix and a Sprint left. That swing has lit up social feeds with claims McLaren have tilted the table toward Norris. It’s a neat storyline. Keedle says it’s also nonsense.
Speaking on SEN Breakfast, Keedle made it clear he’s not dialled into McLaren’s inner meetings this season, but he knows the place well enough to reject the conspiracies. “From the outside it can look suspicious,” he admitted, “but McLaren are very fair and handle it well internally.” He pointed to the obvious: the development race never sleeps. McLaren started 2025 as the class of the field; Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes were never going to sit around and clap.
That checks out. Even within a team, new parts can drag a car into a different set-up window, and when margins are as tight as they are now, confidence and track traits do the rest. Keedle didn’t dress it up. Lose a tenth here, another there, and the picture changes fast. In his view, this is about a young driver — Piastri is 24 — taking his first title run on the chin while the pack around him finds gains. Not grand plots.
McLaren, for their part, haven’t exactly whispered their position. CEO Zak Brown has been adamant the team won’t choose between its drivers. He even framed it bluntly: they’d sooner lose the Drivers’ crown to Max Verstappen than manufacture an outcome in-house. That’s a hard line, but it matches the culture McLaren have tried to build under Andrea Stella — team-first, no heroes, no drama.
And yet the awkward truth never changes in Formula 1: your toughest opponent wears the same colours. Keedle called it a “delicate” balance — two elite egos chasing the same trophy while being told to put the team ahead of themselves. McLaren have already wrapped up the Constructors’ Championship, secured a couple of races back, which removes one headache and, arguably, cranks up another. With the big one banked for Woking, the gloves are off for the drivers’ fight.
If you’re looking for a darker angle, Keedle isn’t your guy. He sees a familiar story: a season that tightened, a rival who surged, a driver feeling the heat. The fixes aren’t mysterious. Clean weekends. A car back in its sweet spot. A start or two that lands. And, crucially, a bit of swagger returning at exactly the right time.
There’s also the Norris factor. He’s been sharp all year, and when the pendulum swung his way, he didn’t blink. That’s not favouritism; that’s form. Piastri’s dip — five races without a top-three — won’t last forever, but the timing has been brutal.
The noise will stick around while the scoreline looks like it does, and that’s part of the job now. What Keedle underscores is that nothing inside McLaren suggests a stitch-up. The orange machine has been the benchmark across a long stretch of 2025 and, as ever, the second half of a title run is where the real engineering and mental grind pays out.
Three races, one Sprint, and a 24-point gap. It’s not a canyon, but it’s not small either. Piastri needs a weekend to breathe life into this fight, preferably tomorrow. The rest — the whispers, the theories, the screenshots — will take care of themselves if the lap time does.
As Keedle put it, this is a 24-year-old trying to win a world championship in public. It’s never tidy. It’s rarely fair. But it’s almost always decided by the subtle stuff — the tenths you find, not the ones you imagine being taken away.
