Can you share your thoughts on the media not letting go of the lando oscar rivalry? I'm not exactly picking up what you are putting down
Throughout most of last season, as they were in a fight for the WDC, and even a good bit before that as Oscar started to get podiums and win races, the media was constantly trying to wedge in any crack and tug at any thread that might suggest, reveal, or create something nasty between them because toxic drama means views and ratings and plenty to gossip about. There was never anything really to be found outside of on-track incidents that were resolved in most cases before the track even went properly cold after the race.
And yet they kept prying, they kept asking, and the answer remained the same: "Things are the same as they've ever been, maybe even better." Just days before the race that would decide it all last season, please recall that they were like this:
Since the beginning of this season, both have been asked in multiple interviews across just about every type of media if anything's changed, if anything's more awkward, if things have become uncomfortable...every version of the question you can imagine, still looking for some kind of proof that all was/is not well in the House of McLaren. And yet every time, the response from both of them still remains: "Nothing's changed, things might actually be even better now. Even as recently as this past weekend, Lando was STILL being asked this in the media day press conference.
Well, if Lando and Oscar are going to put up such an impenetrable and united front, maybe the cracks can be found between one of them and the team. Rumors swirled constantly throughout last season of favoritism (as they tend to do in intra-team battles), particularly after the swap in Monza, which is still regularly referenced as evidence that there is some kind of rift being concealed between Oscar and McLaren.
I don't think many people would dispute that McLaren, as it exists currently as a team, is very much The House That Lando Built. No other driver in history has had as many race starts with the team. He's been in their program for over a decade at this point. It's hard to deny that he has, at least on occasion, received favorable treatment over his other teammates without anything on the other end to balance it out. So it's not a gigantic logical leap to suspect that Oscar is experiencing the same.
However, there is one major difference in the team since Oscar joined: Andrea Stella. Since he arrived as team principal in 2023, there has been a major emphasis on equal treatment of both drivers, openness between the garages, and mutual respect. This shift in philosophy from the more "conventional" approach of his predecessors is, in my opinion, what makes the current iteration of McLaren particularly unique and creates an environment that facilitates a healthy working relationship between the drivers and the team and between the drivers themselves.
Much in the way that the media seem to refuse to entirely buy that everything is chill between Lando and Oscar, however, they also don't seem to entirely buy that McLaren is living up to the team values that they put out to the public. And if they're not, it would be Oscar who would be the one to suffer for it in a team that his teammate has been connected to for his entire single-seater career.
So for the media to constantly suggest and promote rumors that Oscar is unhappy at McLaren and is looking to move to another team is to suggest that the team does not treat its drivers as equally as it claims to, that the team continues to favor Lando, and that if that is the case, there is no way that the relationship between Oscar and Lando could be as good as they insist that it is. Which brings us back to the media getting the story of the animosity between teammates that they've been looking for all along.
And yet, we have Oscar stating multiple times and in multiple ways, sometimes within interviews and sometimes entirely unprompted, saying that he's happy at McLaren, has no designs on leaving, and that he feels like he has an opportunity to build a legacy with the team. And even more unusually, you also had noted Lando Norris supremacist Zak Brown going out of his way on multiple occasions to state that the team is happy with Oscar and that they expect him to stay on with the team for quite some time, using language that was a lot more definitive than one might expect from a team CEO when talking about these kinds of things like "their names are engraved on their seats" or that one of them would basically have to be completely unable to race before he'd look at replacing either driver at this point.
To speak that definitively on the record less than a year out from getting sued for making similar guarantees to a reserve driver in private would be an absolutely boneheaded mistake to make again. And say what you will about Zak Brown, but people like him don't get to where they are by repeating mistakes like that.
If, after well over a month of very intentional messaging that the team are looking to keep their driver lineup and that both Lando and Oscar intend to stay at McLaren for the foreseeable future, it turns out that wasn't true, the fallout would be catastrophic for basically everyone involved. Something would have to have gone terribly, terribly wrong for it to turn out that Oscar is leaving or being pushed out after all. Which, again, is exactly the toxicity and drama that the media have been turning over every stone in the paddock for the past three and a half years to find and coming up empty every time.
No matter what angle you look at it from, the motivation always circles back to the media refusing to believe that all is well between Lando and Oscar and looking for any evidence that could prove otherwise.
