McLaren considering team orders despite Oscar Piastri plea amid Max Verstappen threat

McLaren boss Andrea Stella has refused to rule out picking a number one driver to see off the threat of Max Verstappen. The Dutchman is now just 40 points behind championship leader Oscar Piastri after scoring maximum points across the Sprint weekend in Austin.

With five rounds to go, including two more Sprints, McLaren are not hitting the panic button just yet. But even though he is not ready to prioritise either Piastri or Lando Norris just yet, team principal Stella admitted it remains an option.

He said: "When it comes to having to make a call as to a driver, this will only be led by mathematics. We talked before about the experience and leaning on the experience, I can recall at least 2007, 2010, in which you go to the last race and it's actually the third that wins the championship. So we're not going to close the door unless this is closed by mathematics."

The 2007 season he referenced saw Kimi Raikkonen snatch the title from McLaren duo Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso who had spent all season squabbling over the championship. The relationship between Norris and Piastri has been far more cordial but taking points off one another is far from ideal when Verstappen is the only one at Red Bull in the fight.

Stella was Raikkonen's Ferrari performance engineer that year and so knows from experience how a late-season charge can change everything. And the Italian is desperate for his drivers not to be distracted by the threat four-time champion Verstappen poses.

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He said: "What we are facing in this moment, which is a tight competition to win races, a tight competition in the quest for the drivers' championship, is what Formula 1 is about. If anything, it was anomalous when we were doing easily. That's not what Formula 1 is about. It's a process of getting used to this kind of pressure, which we want to live with maximum intensity and minimum stress. We don't want to lose the joy of doing what we do.

"We just want to make sure that we put ourselves in the state in which we perform at our best, which also includes keeping having fun and recognising that ultimately it's quite a big privilege to be in this situation. So what we do in the future is very easy. We keep doing the good work and the results will take care of themselves."

Piastri continues to lead the championship but has not won a race since the Dutch GP in August. He has lost ground to both Norris and Verstappen in each of the last four race weekends and said after Sunday's race in Austin that he doesn't want McLaren to favour him now.

Piastri said: "We're still so incredibly tight. We've both said we wanted an opportunity to try and fight for the championship because we deserve it. I think it's far too close to start picking one over the other."