Should McLaren focus on one driver in title battle?

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2 days ago

Canadian Grand Prix
Venue: Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, Montreal Dates: 13-15 June Race start: 19:00 BST on Sunday
Coverage: Live commentary of first practice, third practice and qualifying on BBC Radio 5 Sports Extra 2, with FP2 on Sports Extra. Race is on BBC Radio 5 Live; live text updates on BBC Sport website and app
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Formula 1 heads back to North America this weekend for the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal.
There is now some daylight at the top of the drivers' standings between the McLaren drivers and the rest with Oscar Piastri 10 points ahead of team-mate Lando Norris, and Red Bull's Max Verstappen a further 39 points behind Norris.
Before the race at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, BBC Sport F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers your latest questions.
Should McLaren be focusing on one driver for the title? We have seen other teams be dominant at the beginning of a season and slip back later on. - Luke
This debate is an interesting one.
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On one side, teams often receive criticism when they impose team orders and favour one driver over another.
On another, the same can happen when they have two evenly matched drivers, both in a title fight, and they split the points between them against a rival who is the only driver challenging from another team.
The second is clearly the case this year.
For parallels in history, one can look back, for example, to 1986, when the Williams was the fastest car but Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet made a pair of warring team-mates and McLaren's Alain Prost drove a wonderful season to slip through the middle and claim the title in a dramatic final race in Australia.
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Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri are - so far - very much not Mansell and Piquet. Relations between them are good and the intra-team battle is being conducted in a way for which all teams would wish.
McLaren don't really have a choice at the moment but to conduct this season as they are so far doing.
Norris and Piastri have contracts that guarantee them equal treatment, and as a team McLaren's philosophy is to allow free competition between their drivers.
The one proviso is that they remember they are driving for a team and that, from time to time, they may be asked to do something that maximises the team's interests but perhaps not their own.
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McLaren are approaching this with a philosophy of openness. Keep talking. Don't let anything go unsaid. Be honest. If an issue comes up, it'll because no one had thought of it. Not because of any attempt to conceal.
They accept that the drivers are likely to clash, but they believe that, because of their approach, they will be able to handle that, too.
So far, it's working. They accept that Max Verstappen is a real threat, even that there is a risk he could 'do a Prost'.
But as Piastri put it in a BBC Sport interview in Monaco: "It is a possibility, yes. But, on both sides of the garage here, we want to win because we've been the best driver, the best team, including against the other car in the team. You always want to earn things on merit and you want to be able to beat everyone, including your team-mates.
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"So that gives Lando and I the best chance of our personal goals of trying to become drivers' world champion, while also achieving the main result for the team, which is the constructors' championship.
"If we do get beaten by Max, of course that would hurt, but we would know that we both had the same opportunity, we were racing everybody out there and that's just how it panned out.
"For us it's the most straightforward, the fairest way of going racing and that's what we've asked for."
Has the Franco Colapinto swap at Alpine backfired? He does not seem to have been much of a step over the less experienced Jack Doohan. - Tim
It would be going quite far to say that it has backfired after just three races, but it's true to say that it's hard to discern any major difference between Colapinto's performance and Doohan's before him.
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When executive adviser - and de facto team boss - Flavio Briatore brought Colapinto in, he said he wanted him to "be fast, not crash and score points".
So far, the Argentine has failed to meet that target on every level.
Colapinto had a significant crash on his debut weekend at Imola. In his three qualifying sessions so far, he is 0.392 seconds on average slower than team-mate Pierre Gasly, compared with Doohan's 0.366secs over the first six races. And, like Doohan, he has scored no points.
Colapinto has another couple of races before he reaches the five Alpine's statement announcing his elevation to the race seat said he would have before the situation was reassessed - a deadline Briatore immediately rejected as soon as he spoke in public about the swap.
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What happens next is anyone's guess.
Why is the last chicane in the Canadian Grand Prix so difficult, causing many drivers to hit the 'Wall of Champions'? - Christopher
The concrete wall on the exit of Turns 12 and 13 at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve earned its nickname after Damon Hill, Michael Schumacher and Jacques Villeneuve all crashed there in 1999.
Many others - including Sebastian Vettel and Jenson Button - have since followed suit.
It's tricky because it is approached from very high speed, drivers have to bounce over the kerbs to be fast, and if they misjudge that, there is a wall waiting to collect them on the outside, with no run-off area.
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Put that combination together, and it's no wonder drivers crash there.
Donington Park hosted the 1993 European Grand Prix, a race won by Ayrton Senna in one of his greatest performances. It was the last time a circuit other than Silverstone staged an F1 race in the UK [Getty Images]
With Spain likely having two races next season and Italy having had two for the last few years, I find it odd that the UK hasn't had more than one at different tracks in a season since 1993. Considering the majority of the teams are based here, the massive F1 fanbase that Britain has and the very good attendances Silverstone gets every year, why do you think the UK has not been considered to host more than one? - James
Two reasons - money and circuit specification.
Imola returned to the calendar in the pandemic year of 2020, and a way was found to keep it on afterwards because the local region of Emilia-Romagna and the Italian government saw its promotional value and found the sanctioning fee. Hence the event's rather convoluted and inelegant official title.
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Of course, it didn't hurt that F1 chairman Stefano Domenicali is from Imola and was keen for the race to continue.
In Spain, Barcelona has kept its place next year because it has a contract through 2026, while Madrid is entering the first year of its new contract. Again, state funding is involved in both events.
Britain has two issues. One, while the country has many terrific race tracks, only Silverstone meets modern F1 standards. And there is no money for any of them to pay F1 to host a race. Making the British Grand Prix work on a financial basis is difficult enough for Silverstone as it is.
On top of that, slowly but surely the idea of countries hosting more than one race is likely to die away, so it's highly unlikely there would be any appetite for another country to have two.
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Apart, that is, from the USA, where there are three races, in Austin, Miami and Las Vegas, because it is such a large and important marketplace for the sport's commercial rights holders, Liberty Media.
Would competition be more level across all teams, and expenditure lower if rules existed for longer periods without change? - Matthew
Expenditure is set by the budget cap. It makes no difference what the rules are, teams will spend to that limit and no more.
As for keeping the rules in place for a longer period, yes, everyone accepts that the field closes up the longer a set of regulations remains in place. You can see that this year, when the field is probably more compact in terms of time from front to back than it has ever been.
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But it is part of the DNA of F1 to change the rules every few years.
Often it's because there is a feeling the cars need to be slowed down, or changed in character in some ways; sometimes it's because it has been perceived that the engine formula needs to change.
For 2026, it's all of those reasons.
The new power-unit rules were conceived as a way of simplifying the engines and attracting the VW Group into F1. After Audi committed, Ford and General Motors followed suit.
Having created a new power-unit design, with a much greater proportion of its performance derived from the electrical part of the engine, the chassis rules needed to be changed to ensure the cars worked holistically with that engine, and also to iron out some issues that were perceived to have arisen with the existing ones.
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The process of refining the 2026 chassis regulations has not been without its difficulties, to say the least, and there are questions as to how successful the new rules will be.
But that at least is why they're being introduced.