The defending champions are always the ones with a target painted on their back. And McLaren, for the first time since 1999, experienced that heading into the 2025 season.
Everyone on the grid with eyes for victory had set McLaren as the benchmark, but one driver conceded inferiority to the Woking-based squad even before the campaign truly got underway. That driver is George Russell.
The Mercedes driver, last month, claimed that McLaren could go on to win every race on the calendar. “Their car is definitely capable of winning every race… the gap they have on everybody this year was bigger than Red Bull ever had,” Russell had said.
While being hailed as the best on the grid is flattering, McLaren CEO Zak Brown doesn’t pay much heed to it. He’s been in the business long enough to know that rivals praising his car is often just a tactic to pile on the pressure.
“That’s part of the head games and the politics that go on. That’s a way to put pressure on the team, kind of,” Brown said on The Story podcast.
George Russell can’t see anyone catching McLaren this year pic.twitter.com/D6fMs7BD1H
— Autosport (@autosport) March 20, 2025
The American further hinted that Russell’s intention was to frame McLaren’s defeats as bigger failures than they actually were. After all, winning every race in a calendar year has never happened, and with the grid expecting McLaren to achieve just that, falling short would lead to major disappointment.
“If you don’t win all 24, then you’ve done something wrong and it’s a disaster. So that’s nothing more than some of the stuff we spoke about earlier, where people put pressure on people in different ways to try and destabilize them”, Brown further explained.
That said, McLaren has looked leaps and bounds faster than anyone else on the grid this season. They’ve secured two one-two finishes and a 2–3 finish in the last race in Japan.
So, Russell’s claim has already gone out the window, as has the podcast host’s belief that he could be right. Brown quickly shut that down, saying, “We won’t win 24 races this year.”
And he was right. Still, the expectation remains that McLaren will win the majority of them.
