McLaren bumps Red Bull off its throne in F1 championship race

 Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc of Monaco, McLaren’s chief engineer Tom Stallard, first-placed McLaren driver Oscar Piastri of Australia, and Mercedes driver George Russell of Britain stand at the podium after the F1 Grand Prix in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)

McLaren Racing heads into the Singapore Grand Prix as Formula 1’s hot new darlings, the papaya-drenched team that just may be the ones to finally dethrone Red Bull and Max Verstappen.

Red Bull and its Dutch driver have had ironclad grips on both the drivers championship, and, the more lucrative constructors title for best car, since Verstappen won his first title in 2021. Verstappen now has three consecutive titles and leads the driver standings; Red Bull has back-to-back constructors titles but, headed into the weekend, no longer leads the standings.

McLaren took the top spot with Oscar Piastri’s win last Sunday.

READ: F1: Oscar Piastri defends McLaren over rear-wing flex

Coupled with Lando Norris’ fourth-place finish, McLaren is now the constructors leader for the first time since 2014. McLaren last won the constructors’ championship in 1998.

McLaren starts the weekend in Singapore with a 20-point lead over Red Bull, which had led the carmaker competition since 2022. The race is Sunday.

“I think we’ve got as good a shot as anyone,” Zak Brown, the chief executive of McLaren, boldly declared last Sunday at IndyCar’s season-ending race.

McLaren driver Lando Norris of Britain steers his car during the Formula One Italian Grand Prix race at the Monza racetrack, in Monza, Italy, Sunday, Sept. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

He’d watched Piastri win and McLaren move to the top from Nashville, Tennessee, and even with the big-talking American half a world away, McLaren still managed to make tongues wag at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

McLaren arrived in Baku and admitted it would prioritize Norris and the driver championship over Piastri for the final eight races of this season. Norris trails Verstappen by 59 points in the standings ahead of Singapore, and Piastri certainly accepted the team order in stride by winning the race.

READ: F1: Max Verstappen vows Red Bull fightback

“Obviously no racing driver wants to compromise their own race, so of course he doesn’t love it, but he’s a great team player, totally understands, also knows the role could be reversed in the future,” Brown said of Piastri being given the wingman role for the remainder of the season.

“Also, not totally out of the question, it can be reversed later this year. If Lando goes out and has a couple of DNFs, Oscar goes out and wins a couple of races — all of a sudden,” Brown shrugged. “So I think (Piastri) recognizes that what goes around comes around, and it can very much come around his way.”

Norris and Piastri have combined to win two of the last three F1 races for McLaren, while Verstappen hasn’t won since the Spanish Grand Prix on June 23. While the team has said it wants Norris to dethrone Verstappen, Brown knows it is a longshot unless Norris can start sledgehammering-away large chunks of Verstappen’s lead every race.

READ; F1: McLaren set to favor Lando Norris over Oscar Piastri

In Baku last Sunday, Verstappen finished one spot behind Norris in fifth and Norris only gained three points on the champion.

“Lando made some points, but he needs to double the amount of points he got (in Baku) every race to catch him,” Brown said. “I think that’s a tall order, but we’re gonna try.”

Make no mistake, though, McLaren is hyper-focused on the constructors title, which is the one that pays the big money. The payout to the winning team is set by variables each year but is typically worth at least $140 million in prize money.

Red Bull’s falloff has been so dramatic that Brown doesn’t even consider the team to be the top rivals for best constructor this year.

“I think Ferrari has showed how quick they are, so I actually think Ferrari might even be a bigger threat than Red Bull as we sit here right now because I think Ferrari will be really strong in Singapore,” Brown said.

Red Bull between Verstappen and Sergio Perez won 38 races over 2022 and 2023. Verstappen through 17 races this season has seven wins; Perez is winless.

Brown praised McLaren’s rise under team principal Andrea Stella, who was hailed as “a wonderful team boss” by Brown.

“Andrea and the leadership team have been able to unlock the potential and the people,” Brown said of his young team’s turnaround. McLaren is one of racing’s most popular brands globally, and Brown has been clawing the team back toward the top-tier of F1 after a long drought.

Elevating McLaren’s IndyCar program

McLaren’s IndyCar Mexican driver Pato O’Ward is greeted by fans before the Formula One United States Grand Prix, at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas on October 23, 2022. (Photo by Patrick T. FALLON / AFP)

It’s been a sometimes-bumpy climb since Brown was named CEO of McLaren in 2018. He is, after all, the American who loves to stir the pot as much as he loves talking about his own racing career. Some of Brown’s moves have been chaotic, particularly a messy 2022 when he successfully snatched Piastri and thought he had IndyCar champion Alex Palou locked down, too.

Palou — after a mediator said he couldn’t join McLaren until 2024 — changed his mind last year and decided to remain with Chip Ganassi Racing in IndyCar. He didn’t want to move to McLaren’s less-competitive IndyCar team with the hope either Norris or Piastri’s seat opened in F1.

Palou in Nashville won his third IndyCar title, and is headed to another mediator late this year in McLaren’s $30 million breach of contract suit against the Spaniard.

The driver signing carousel became comical even among diehard McLaren fans, and that was before this year went wild before the season even started. David Malukas, the guy Brown hired last minute to take Palou’s saved seat, broke his wrist a month before the IndyCar opener in a cycling crash and the team used three different drivers in that car this year.

Malukas was not one of them as McLaren had a contractual clause to fire him once he missed four consecutive races. The saga of that seat hurt the team, which didn’t give Pato O’Ward a consistent car to fight for the championship, and Brown has again overhauled the driver lineup ahead of 2025 and O’Ward will have two new teammates next year.

It’s taken him a long time to get McLaren back in F1, and Brown is pleased with the pace because where the team is headed into Singapore is a far cry from its disastrous and uncompetitive 2023 season.

Brown wants the IndyCar team at the top now, too.

“I want to get the IndyCar car team being where the Formula 1 team is,” Brown said. “I think we’re still a young team. We’re continuing to hire, continuing to make changes in the offseason… I kind of feel like the IndyCar team is on the same trajectory of the Formula 1 team, but the Formula 1 team is just ahead at the moment.”