Zak Brown didn’t exactly shut down the Oscar Piastri-to-Red Bull chatter — but he didn’t need to. Instead, McLaren’s CEO did what the best operators in the modern paddock do when the rumour mill starts chewing on their talent: he widened the lens.
Of course Red Bull would look at Piastri if Max Verstappen ever walked. Of course they would. Brown’s point was simpler, and sharper: if you’ve got two drivers like Lando Norris and Piastri, you’re basically living in a permanent state of being hunted.
“I would imagine there’s not a team on the grid that wouldn’t want to have Oscar and Lando driving for them,” Brown said in an interview with *The Athletic*. It landed like the kind of line that’s half compliment, half warning — not to his drivers, but to anyone who thinks McLaren can be destabilised with a few well-placed whispers.
The Verstappen subplot has resurfaced in recent weeks, as it always does when the sport enters one of its periodic bouts of “what if?” around its biggest name. And as soon as that door creaks open, the replacement shortlist starts getting written in ink. Piastri’s name has been mentioned as a plausible target, the logic being obvious: elite pace, calm under pressure, and young enough to be built around.
What’s changed in 2026 is that McLaren aren’t the easy mark they once might have been. The early rounds of this new era didn’t go perfectly for the reigning champions, but the recovery has been quick and loud. Piastri’s second place in Japan — after leading early on — was a statement of form as much as result. Norris then won the Miami Sprint in a McLaren one-two, before taking second in the Grand Prix while leaning hard on championship leader Kimi Antonelli.
In other words: there’s no obvious competitive escape route anymore. If Red Bull is supposed to be the gravitational centre of driver ambition, McLaren are doing an impressive job of changing the physics.
Brown, for his part, framed it less as a driver market issue and more as a culture war — the kind teams fight quietly every day. He was explicit that McLaren’s goal isn’t to strap people in with contracts and hope the paperwork does the heavy lifting. It’s to build a place they don’t want to leave.
“My job, our job” is to “create an environment where our drivers don’t want to drive anywhere else,” Brown said, extending the same logic to staff and sponsors. It’s a neat acknowledgement of a truth teams don’t always like saying out loud: in Formula 1, the best retention strategy is momentum. When a team looks like it’s going somewhere, people tend to stay on the bus.
Brown also made it clear this isn’t just about protecting two star names. “There’s a lot of talent inside McLaren that other racing teams would like to have,” he said — and that’s arguably the more telling anxiety. In the cost-cap world, you can’t simply outspend your way through problems, so rival teams go shopping for problem-solvers instead. A strong car attracts attention; a strong technical group invites raids.
As for Piastri, the Red Bull link is flattering but also a reminder of how quickly the narrative can turn a driver into a “next in line” rather than what he currently is: one half of a front-running partnership at a team that’s visibly committed to being a two-car operation.
That detail matters. The lazy take is that Piastri must be desperate to step out of Norris’s shadow. The reality inside this McLaren, at least from the way it’s being run and presented, is that the team’s ceiling depends on not choosing. It’s structured to extract performance from both sides of the garage, not to build a single-driver monarchy.
Red Bull, on the other hand, is the great unknown in this hypothetical. If Verstappen actually left, the vacant seat wouldn’t just be “a top drive” — it would be *the* seat, the one that defines how the team rebuilds its identity. That’s tempting for any driver with ambition and self-belief. There’s a romance to being the new centre of gravity, the fresh start, the one who “moulds the team” around their needs.
But that romance comes with risk. Because if McLaren have made anything clear in the opening stretch of 2026, it’s that they’re once again landing development swings — Miami’s upgrades moved them right back into the sharp end of the conversation. And in this cycle of regulations, being in the right place technically is worth more than being the nominal number one somewhere else.
So Brown isn’t really responding to one rumour. He’s responding to the ecosystem that produces them: a paddock where success gets you poached, uncertainty gets you speculated about, and “availability” is as much perception as reality.
McLaren can’t stop Red Bull asking the question. They can only make sure the answer is obvious — not because a contract says it is, but because the team’s trajectory does. In 2026, that’s the real power play.
