Verstappen still “in the game” despite 81-point championship gap

McLaren is not ruling out Max Verstappen in the fight for this year’s world championship despite his growing deficit to their two drivers.

Oscar Piastri leads team mate Lando Norris by 16 points while Verstappen is now 81 adrift. Red Bull have been unable to reverse their recent slump in performance and Verstappen has gone three races without finishing on the podium – his worst run in six years.

However with a maximum of 299 points available over the remaining races, McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said the title fight is “definitely not” a two-horse fight between his drivers.

“I only agree with mathematics,” he said. “So once mathematics tells us that’s the case, then I’ll change my answer.”

“I wouldn’t exclude Max, for instance, being in the game,” he added. “So we are very wary. We remain concentrated, but we want to put our drivers in a position to sustain their quest until the end of the season.”

Norris began the season in the lead of the championship but Piastri moved ahead at round five and has been there ever since. Although Norris has more experience than his team mate, Stella said Piastri is progressing at a rapid rate.

“Lando may have a bit more experience in terms of number of races,” he said. “He started the season in Australia with a strong result, but ultimately, in Australia, Oscar was there with Lando. Oscar lost points in Australia just because we had the sudden rain in the final part of the circuit.

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“I think one of Oscar’s qualities is to learn very fast, very rapidly. He has demonstrated it in his career, winning pretty much [in his] first year in all the junior categories. He has demonstrated it at McLaren. Now we have Lando and Oscar driving and operating at very, very similar levels.”

Stella said the changes the team has made to the MCL39 since the season began has addressed some of the problems Norris had with it in the opening rounds when Piastri built up his championship lead.

“This season, what we have to acknowledge as a team is that we have made some modifications to the launch version of the car that actually affected Lando’s driving style,” said Stella.

“We made some upgrades which mean that right now some of the settings used by Lando and Oscar are slightly different, but we are pleased that now both drivers can drive to a certain extent in a natural way. They can express their talent, and we see that they are very, very close.

“This makes it a great spectacle for Formula 1, this is what we wanted to achieve as a team, and I think it’s going to be very interesting until the end of the season.”

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