Zak Brown has had enough of the idea that McLaren “picked a side” during last year’s intra-team title fight — and, with 2026 now underway, he’s warning anyone hoping for a clean, orderly hierarchy that they’re probably about to be disappointed again.
Speaking in Melbourne ahead of the season opener, Brown dismissed the lingering claims that the team leaned toward Lando Norris as Oscar Piastri’s 2025 championship challenge unravelled late on. In Brown’s view, the noise said far more about fandom than it did about how McLaren actually went racing.
“A lot of it was very inaccurate,” he said. “At the end of the day, we let both our drivers race, race hard… It came down to the last race of the year with both with a chance of winning the championship. Quite proud of that.”
The flashpoints that fuelled the theory-crafting are well known in the paddock. Piastri left Zandvoort with a seventh win and a 34-point lead, only for the momentum to turn sharply from Monza onwards. At the Italian Grand Prix, McLaren’s day went sideways when Norris suffered a botched pit stop — and Piastri was instructed to hand second place back to his team-mate. Two races later in Singapore, Piastri questioned why the courtesy wasn’t returned after Norris made contact at Turn 1 and still emerged ahead on the road.
McLaren did punish Norris for that incident, but the optics quickly got murky again when the consequence effectively vanished one weekend later after Piastri clipped Norris in the Sprint in Austin amid a multi-car crash. Online, the narrative hardened: Norris had been at McLaren longer, Norris is British, therefore McLaren must have wanted Norris to be champion.
Brown called those allegations “shocking” and “uninformed”, and his frustration was aimed less at criticism — which every team gets — and more at the certainty with which some of it was delivered.
“We were prepared for the consequence of someone not winning because we’re taking points off each other,” he said. “But as a racing team, we’ll let both drivers race fairly equitably.
“Of course, we made mistakes along the way. They made mistakes along the way. That’s racing… You can’t control people’s opinions at sport. People are going to have their views, but it is shocking at times how uninformed people are in their allegations of what they think we’re up to.”
What’s interesting is how much of last year’s row attached itself to the phrase “papaya rules” — a bit of radio shorthand that became, almost overnight, a brand. Brown reckons McLaren essentially did this to itself by putting a name to something every team already has: a framework for how team-mates are allowed to fight without turning the garage into a war zone.
“I know we kind of gave it a name that one time on the radio, and I think had we not done that, it probably wouldn’t be a thing,” he said. “Because I think every racing team has rules on how their drivers should race, and ours are really no different than anyone else, other than we’re committed to having two drivers with equal opportunities to win.”
That last line is the key, and it’s also why this story isn’t going away. Plenty of teams talk about equality in the abstract; far fewer mean it when the Drivers’ Championship is on the line. McLaren, to its credit (or to its self-inflicted stress), appears willing to live with the mess that comes with letting two genuine title contenders take points off each other.
Brown isn’t promising a calmer 2026, either. If anything, he’s leaning into the inevitability that Norris and Piastri will end up back in each other’s air again — provided the car is good enough to matter.
“I don’t think you’ll see anything differently,” he said. “We refine our approach to race weekends every race weekend… but I think the papaya rules are probably not much different to McLaren as it is any other team in the pit lane.”
In other words: don’t expect McLaren to quietly slide toward number-one/number-two status just because last year got uncomfortable. The team might adjust execution — fewer operational errors, clearer calls, tighter messaging — but the underlying philosophy sounds intact.
And from Brown’s standpoint, there’s an obvious upside. Norris arrives as the reigning champion, “shoulders out” and visibly carrying himself like a man who expects to be hunted. Piastri, meanwhile, has the kind of simmering edge drivers get when they believe the next step is small but decisive.
“I think they’re both very fired up,” Brown said. “Lando… wants to go for number two. Oscar equally so… If you take a look at the leap he made from ’24 to ’25 it was outstanding. So if he’s done a fraction of that leap from ’25 to ’26, watch out.”
That’s not a CEO soothing the second car; that’s a CEO effectively admitting the team could be back in the same knife fight as soon as the first stint strategy diverges.
There’s a neat irony here. McLaren can argue — with some justification — that last year was proof its approach worked: it won the Drivers’ title, it won the Constructors’ title, and both drivers took seven wins. But success doesn’t reduce scrutiny; it multiplies it. When you tell the world your two drivers are free to race, the world starts auditing every marginal call for evidence that you didn’t really mean it.
Brown’s message in Melbourne was simple: McLaren meant it then, and it means it now. If that creates another season of second-guessing, conspiracy chatter and radio micro-analysis, so be it. The only thing McLaren seems unwilling to do is take the easy route — and in a sport that often defaults to control, that choice is going to keep the spotlight exactly where Brown says he doesn’t want it.
