McLaren must also deal with disappointment amid runaway success

LONDON :McLaren boss Zak Brown is preparing to deal with disappointment at the end of the Formula One season, even as the team enjoy one of their most dominant years and a 200th grand prix win at the weekend.

As the title battle between Oscar Piastri and teammate Lando Norris heats up, the McLaren pair separated by just nine points after Sunday's Hungarian Grand Prix, the American conceded he was thinking also about how to handle the aftermath.

Red Bull's reigning champion Max Verstappen, the McLaren drivers' closest rival, is now 97 points off the pace and told reporters at the weekend that he may not win again this year given his car's issues.

Even before the weekend, both Piastri and Norris cast caution aside and called it a two-horse race.

One of them will surely end the year celebrating a dream come true.

The other will rue what might have been, with a new engine era next season shaking everything up again and chances potentially disappearing.

Losing always hurts, doubly so when it is to a teammate with the same car, and Brown said McLaren would have to deal with the situation sensitively when - although he still insisted on saying if - the time came.

"Eventually... we'll just sit down and actually have a conversation and go 'right, one of you is going to win and it's going to be the best day of your life. One of you is going to lose. How do you want us to handle that?'," he told a select group of reporters.

"We'll actually sit down and go 'Right, you want us to jump up and down and celebrate? This guy won'. So we're fully aware and sensitive to 'how do you celebrate that situation?'."

Australian Piastri has won six races to Norris's five but the Briton has momentum going into the August break, with three wins from his last