Matt Bishop: McLaren F1 duet played a winning tune — but soloist Max almost made it to No1

There are, and there always have been, two ways to skin the Formula 1 cat. One is to pick your sharpest sabre, polish it to a glinting shine, and hand it to a single, exalted, and carefully cosseted swashbuckler. The other is to arm two knights equally, and to encourage them to dash into the fray together, agreeing only that the honour of the team is paramount but declining to stipulate which of them is allowed to thrust most boldly. It is an age-old quandary, this matter of whether to select a designated number-one driver or to back a pair of prime contenders; and, despite the passing of the decades, the technical and budgetary revolutions, and the countless other changes to our sport since 1950, that old dilemma remained an omnipresent theme of the 2025 Formula 1 world championship.

Before I dive into this year — the year of papaya coronation — let me confess something at the outset, because transparency in journalism is important. For nearly a decade — from 2008 to 2017 — I worked for McLaren as its communications and PR director. I loved the team, I still have friends on the inside, and I cannot pretend that I do not derive a certain warm satisfaction from seeing my old colleagues hoist silverware again. Yes, I admit it: when Lando Norris crossed the line in third place in Abu Dhabi two days ago, thereby securing the F1 drivers’ world championship, I might have raised a discreet glass of something fizzy; indeed, I might even have shed a tear. But affection is not allegiance, and admiration is not bias. One can applaud McLaren for its triumphs yet still acknowledge the brute brilliance of Max Verstappen and the cold logic of Red Bull’s one-driver-rules-the-world approach, especially when that one driver is one of the greatest we have ever seen.

Even so, to follow the 2025 F1 world championship was to enjoy a duet — a bright, youthful, and above all harmonious one — sung by Norris and his McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri. They complement each other extremely well. Each is quick, each is clean, each is good-natured, and both seem to have been shaped in the Woking wind tunnel to match the commercially optimal 21st-century F1 archetype: the fit and fashionable boy-band F1 driver. Their bosses and engineers like them because they not only deliver but also obey. Throughout the 2025 season they traded wins: Norris in Australia, Monaco, Austria, Britain, Hungary, Mexico, and Brazil, and Piastri in China, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Miami, Spain, Belgium, and Holland. Their cumulative points tally powered McLaren to an unassailable lead in the F1 constructors’ standings with six rounds still to run.

Verstappen chased the McLaren pair like a foxhound trained to scent papaya

But harmony, although beautiful, can also be dangerous. Two singers of equal pitch occasionally drown each other out. While Norris and Piastri were performing their elegant arias together, Verstappen was belting out a barnstorming solo, backed by a Red Bull orchestra prepared to throw every resource, every upgrade, and every strategic advance at him alone. First Liam Lawson, then Yuki Tsunoda, were never anything more than bit players, and both have now been demoted, as is the fate of almost all Red Bull number-twos. Max started the season in a car that was the second-best, sometimes even the third-best. Yet as the calendar turned to its autumn races — the stage of the season at which every other driver starts to look more and more exhausted, haunted even, and by contrast Verstappen seems to become even faster and even better — he began to chase the McLaren pair like a foxhound that had been trained to scent papaya. Abu Dhabi was almost his crowning ambush, but we will come to that.

To understand why the 2025 F1 season became a philosophical referendum on team hierarchy, we must look back at the years in which that very dilemma has determined the destinies of F1 world championships. Every so often, a team wins the F1 constructors’ crown via the achievements of two equal number-one drivers, but in doing so it hands the drivers’ title to the undisputed superstar of a rival outfit.

Take 1973. Colin Chapman’s Lotus team was a picture-perfect masterpiece: sleek, black-and-gold cars; the formidable Emerson Fittipaldi and the magnificent Ronnie Peterson; no hint of team orders anywhere on the horizon. Fittipaldi and Peterson raced each other with unfettered abandon, sometimes to Chapman’s delight but often to his exasperation. Yet while they traded wins and pushed each other to dizzy heights, scoring a combined total of seven grand prix victories in so doing — almost half the season’s total of 15 rounds — Tyrrell’s Jackie Stewart quietly and methodically accumulated the points he needed. Stewart was the designated number-one at Tyrrell – his team built around him, his car tailored to him, his team-mate François Cevert serving as both lieutenant and friend. The result? A constructors’ championship for Lotus, and a drivers’ championship for Stewart. Fittipaldi was furious, and he left Lotus for McLaren as a result.

Eight years later, in 1981, the story repeated itself. Williams fielded two drivers who were equally brilliant, albeit in completely different ways, and were both emotionally allergic to playing second fiddle. Alan Jones and Carlos Reutemann respected each other, but only in the sense that two stags respect each other’s antlers, and they refused to concede ground. Reutemann famously ignored a pit-board instruction in Brazil ordering him to allow Jones past. Their civil war simmered all year. Meanwhile, at Brabham, Nelson Piquet — the sole centre of Bernie Ecclestone’s and Gordon Murray’s attention — kept scoring podium finishes and finally snatched the drivers’ title by a single point. Again: constructors’ success for the team of two megastars; drivers’ glory for the team of just one, for Piquet’s team-mate, Héctor Rebaque, rarely troubled the scorers all year.

In 1983, Ferrari won the F1 constructors’ world championship thanks to René Arnoux and Patrick Tambay, who scored four grand prix wins between them. Yet neither man was ever required to assist the other, even though Arnoux could have become world champion if he had won the season’s last race, in South Africa. Instead he DNF’d with engine trouble, as did Tambay, so in practice there was no potential glory squandered, but the point remains. The Arnoux-Tambay rivalry was not nearly as bitter as Jones versus Reutemann had been; but, equally, they were not marshalled, and perhaps they should have been. As a result, once more, Piquet — still, in essence, Brabham’s one and only world championship focus, even though his team-mate Riccardo Patrese was a sizeable cut above Rebaque — seized his second crown.

Then came 1986, a turbulent season during which an angry internal duel between the two Williams drivers, Piquet (again!) and Nigel Mansell, was allowed first to develop then to fester. Both were blindingly quick, both fancied themselves as rightful world champions, and both were permitted by Frank Williams and Patrick Head to race each other freely. Their colossal points haul gave Williams an enormous constructors’ title margin, but their mutual unwillingness to yield – and their bosses’ refusal to pick a winner and favour him – cracked the door open just wide enough for McLaren’s Alain Prost, the thinking man’s assassin, to slip through. To be fair, McLaren was assisted by Keke Rosberg’s unexpected failure to match Prost’s pace. As a result, Prost took advantage by snatching the title in Adelaide in one of the most astonishing finales ever seen, and a nine-win duet was defeated by a four-win soloist.

Fast-forward to 2008. Ferrari had the strongest car – just – developed with typical Maranello artistry, and its drivers, the reigning world champion Kimi Räikkönen and his team-mate Felipe Massa, were treated as equals. Räikkönen won two grands prix early on, at Sepang and Barcelona, but he won no more thereafter. Massa ultimately emerged as Ferrari’s more consistent performer, winning six races, and, although he very nearly became world champion anyway – missing out by a single corner in Brazil – Lewis Hamilton, McLaren’s unambiguous number-one, grabbed the drivers’ title by the slenderest of margins, despite winning only five times. Ferrari still won the constructors’ title, yet Hamilton – like Stewart in 1973, like Piquet in 1981 and 1983, and like Prost in 1986 before him – showed the value of a singular focus.

Verstappen delivered a victory so perfect that it might have been performed with surgical gloves

So now let us look at 2025, a season in which history seemed poised to repeat itself, only for McLaren to close F1’s book of serial self-harm just before its final pages could mimic the sad stories told in its 1973, 1981, 1983, 1986, and 2008 chapters. For almost the entire season McLaren adhered to the modern equivalent of the Lotus, Williams, Ferrari, Williams, and Ferrari modus operandi adopted in 1973, 1981, 1983, 1986, and 2008: namely, to run two equal number-one drivers with full equality and no internal constraints. Andrea Stella, rational to his core, insisted that the best way to win F1 world championships was to let two drivers flourish; Zak Brown, ever the showman, added that he wanted fans to see authentic racing between team-mates, not choreographed formations. For most of the year they were vindicated. Norris and Piastri nudged and pushed each other hard but they never used their elbows as weapons.