Zak Brown’s verdict on Oscar Piastri wasn’t wrapped in caveats or cautious corporate speak. “He is a future World Champion,” McLaren’s CEO said without blinking, after a title fight that pushed both his drivers to their edges and left one of them—Lando Norris—at the top of the world.
It was the kind of season that hardens careers and rewrites résumés. Piastri led the 2025 championship at the halfway mark, 34 points clear after Zandvoort, and looked every bit the man in control. Then came the swing. Norris put together a searing run as McLaren found rhythm and ruthlessness, and Max Verstappen—never one to vacate a title fight quietly—threatened to rip the whole thing up in the finale. By Abu Dhabi, it was a three-man shootout. Norris nicked it by two points over Verstappen. Piastri, late-season charge and all, had to swallow third.
That’s where Brown’s “cruel sport” line landed. Because for all the narrative whiplash, the McLaren garage didn’t fracture. It flourished. Both Norris and Piastri won seven races, elevated the team’s operational sharpness, and refused to let this turn into a demolition derby in papaya. You don’t often see a title-decider featuring two teammates and a reigning monster, and still walk away feeling the team dynamic came out stronger. McLaren did.
“Both our guys won seven races. Drove brilliantly. They supported each other,” Brown told Sky F1. “It’s a cruel sport. Things sometimes go your way. Don’t. But I’m excited to go racing with these two guys next year.”
There’s a reason Brown can be bullish on Piastri. This was the Australian’s third season in Formula 1, and the rough edges you expect at that stage—especially under full title pressure—are clearly turning into race-winning instincts. Piastri’s mid-year authority wasn’t a lucky weather window or a strategy fluke. It was pace, clarity, and control in traffic. When the tide turned, the slump wasn’t catastrophic. He reset, recalibrated, and when the maths looked bleak, he came back swinging to keep the fight alive to the last round. That’s the stuff team bosses keep in their notebooks.
Piastri, as ever, was measured in the postscript. Disappointed? Of course. But you won’t hear many 24-year-olds talk about a title defeat like a study plan.
“Obviously, I would have wished for a slightly different ending, but I think this year I’ve learned a hell of a lot about myself as a race car driver, myself as a person,” he said. “If you had presented this season at the start of the year with the pole positions and the wins and the podiums, I definitely would have been pretty happy with that. Even in the tough moments, I’ve learned a lot about myself and how I can be stronger in the future.”
That last line is important. Because while 2025 had the familiar hallmarks of a classic—team-mates in a knife fight, Verstappen refusing to cede a millimetre—the next act is anything but familiar. 2026 brings a reset: new regulations, new engine architecture, and all the usual talk of “opportunity windows” that can change the pecking order overnight. Some teams will misread it. Some drivers will surf it. McLaren’s continuity, and the way Norris and Piastri pushed each other without pushing the team off a cliff, feels like a competitive advantage when the ground shifts.
What does Piastri need to turn “future World Champion” into something etched in silver? The margins he lost by in the second half of 2025 are the same margins that usually decide modern titles: extracting banker laps on difficult Saturdays, surviving the odd strategy trap, converting recovery races into podiums instead of fourths. He was doing plenty of that already—often superbly—but this was a title fight against a teammate on peak confidence and a three-time champion throwing haymakers. There wasn’t much room for scruffy Sundays.
The bigger takeaway sits with McLaren. The team put two drivers on seven wins apiece and walked away with the big trophy, avoiding the inter-team meltdown that has undone better resourced outfits in the past. That’s a culture win before it’s a technical one. Brown’s job now is to bottle it for ’26.
And Piastri? He doesn’t need a rebrand or a reset button. He needs a winter, a clear head, and a car that keeps giving him Sundays to bend to his will. The rest of the grid can read the same tea leaves Brown is reading. When a team boss calls a driver a future World Champion in public, it’s not PR fluff. It’s a warning.
