07/08/2025 14:42
Ralf Schumacher believes McLaren needs to "sit down" with Oscar
Piastri and Lando Norris before the pair insight the wrath of CEO
Zak Brown. The F1 driver feels the dynamic between the two drivers'
championship rivals could end in tears without intervention from
management at the Woking-based squad. After 14 rounds into the
season, Piastri leads Norris by nine points in the standings, but
they came perilously close to colliding in the recent Hungarian
Grand Prix. The latter held on to triumph at the Hungaroring,
making use of the alternate one-stop strategy, but the former
almost ended both their afternoons with a late lunge at the start
of the penultimate lap, locking up and robbing McLaren of its 200th
grand prix victory. Schumacher, who raced in F1 for Jordan,
Williams and Toyota between 1997 and 2007, suggested the nexus of
the budding tensions is that Piastri's manager, Mark Webber, would
have had grand designs on his driver joining the papaya team and
being its "superhero." In reality, the reigning constructors'
champions continue to insist on parity between Norris and the
Australian, something team principal Andrea Stella and Brown pride
themselves on. "You see how much pressure there is," Schumacher
said on Sky Sports Germany's F1 podcast Backstage Boxengasse . "If
you just looked at Mark Webber, Piastri's manager, he was anything
but enthusiastic, because he obviously wants him to overtake Norris
as well. "Look, Norris is a great driver, and he can certainly
become world champion, but nobody in the team thinks he is Max
Verstappen or anything like that. "So Webber will have thought that
Piastri would join the team and then be the superhero. That does
something to a guy like that." Addressing the near miss on Lap 69
of the Hungarian Grand Prix, the six-time grand prix winner
labelled the fact they did not collide "more luck than wisdom" and
cautioned there could be a "furious" Brown on TV before the end of
the campaign. "It's really more luck than wisdom that those two
didn't hit each other," he added. "That's why I think they all need
to sit down and slow down a bit. "Otherwise, at some point, we're
going to have a furious Zak Brown in front of the camera because
they drove each other off the track."
