Oscar Piastri fears mount as McLaren rivalry with teammate Lando Norris set to ‘boil over'
Piastri leads Norris by nine points at the championship break, in what has quickly become a two-horse race between the McLaren duo, who have won 11 of the 14 grands prix races so far.
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However, Piastri's British teammate has won three out of the past four races.
The latest of which was at the Hungarian Grand Prix, where the Aussie was
the victim of his McLaren team's strategy gamble that all but won the race for Norris, which saw tensions bubble over.
McLaren has done a great job in keeping the relationship between Piastri and Norris amicable, but that may not be possible in the second half of the season, something that became abundantly clear at Hungaroring.
As Piastri was preparing for his final stop at the Hungarian GP, he was asked by race engineer Tom Stallard if he intended to extinguish any glimmer of hope Leclerc had of winning the race, or was instead focused on beating his teammate.
Piastri's blunt response was incredibly telling: 'I don't really care about Leclerc. I just want the best chance to try and beat Lando.'
In the end, he didn't manage to reel in his teammate, and the Aussie was visibly frustrated by the team's tactics.
And Coulhard says with the pair feeling more like arch rivals than teammates, tensions could 'boil over' and fast.
'(Teammates) …. it's a misnomer. He's not your mate. He's your biggest rival,' Coulthard said on the Indo Sport podcast.
'He is the person that whose success is his failure and vice versa. And you take pleasure in their failure. It's as simple as that because it leads and builds.
' … It's a very volatile relationship to manage, and it's one of the most difficult roles for the team principal, whether it was Ron Dennis for Alain Prost and (Ayrton) Senna, Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet under Frank Williams, Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes.
'These are difficult situations that inevitably we will see boil over at McLaren, as with Lando and Oscar. We've seen little signs of it.
'One of those guys will be world champion this year, and it might be the only chance they get. Next year's McLaren might not be any good.
'It's a completely different sport next year. It's still called Formula 1, but this could be their one chance.'
But the rising tensions aren't news to McLaren, with the team set to speak to both men before the second half of the season gets underway on August 31.
Speaking to The Race last week, McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown said the team will work out a plan on how to handle the losing driver when the championship is ultimately decided.
'We'll just sit down and actually have a conversation and go 'Right, one of you is going to win, it's going to be the best day of your life – one of you is going to lose, how do you want us to handle that? You want us to jump up and down and celebrate this guy [who] won?' he said.
'We're fully aware and sensitive to how you celebrate that situation. And I think we'll just sit down with the drivers and come to an agreement: 'One of you is not going to be the champion. How do you want us to act?'
'That's the way we think. It comes back to thinking about our people.'
But McLaren insists they will give both drivers an equal opportunity to take their first title and will give them freedom to race wheel-to-wheel and employ different strategies.
'It's going to come down to execution,' said Brown, speaking about which driver will come out on top.
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