Rejecting Jos Verstappen's claim that he should stand up for himself, Oscar Piastri insists that McLaren is playing fair with both its drivers.

Verstappen entered the great debate today by suggesting that Piastri and his manager - Mark Webber - should bang their fists on the table amidst increasing speculation that the Woking team is engineering the championship in Lando Norris' favour.

While addressing his recent drop in form, Piastri insists that the team is not showing favouritism towards either driver.

"I think, for me, we're always very open with each other in terms of what we think, whether we think things have been fair, whether we think the right decisions have been made," the Australian told reporters at Interlagos.

"And from that side of things we can stand up for ourselves and I feel very comfortable doing that," he added. "And that's very much encouraged by the team to kind of make our point for ourselves individually.

"But I think it's obviously a difficult dynamic to manage when you've got two cars in the same team fighting for a championship that only one car can win," he admitted. "There's obviously naturally going to be difficulties, but I respect the team allowing us to both try and fight for the drivers' championship.

"I think for myself I want to go out there and try and win the championship knowing that I did it on my own merit and doing the things that I could do in my control," he continued. "Obviously if you pick one driver, you've got a 50% chance that you're not going to be that driver. So, I think for me we're very much encouraged and welcomed to stand up for ourselves already, so I don't think anything needs to change."

Addressing his dip in form, Piastri, who in the aftermath of the Mexican Grand Prix, claimed his car was different to before, thus feeding the conspiracy theorists, picked out the two most recent events.

"I think Austin and Mexico are a bit different to quite a lot of other circuits we've been to," he said. "I think even just when you look at the tyre usage on both of those weekends, to have two weekends where the soft tyre in Mexico was a C5 and, apart from the C6, which is kind of off on its own, to have the softest tyres, be the tyre to be on in qualifying and the race is not that usual and that has been a big difference from earlier in the season. So, I think there is something that's been a bit different.

"I don't know what exactly that is," he admitted, "but I think it's just been in some circuits maybe a corner or two where you need to adapt to things like that and drive a bit differently.

"The last couple of weekends it's been you've needed to drive differently all the time in a way that I've not had to for the whole year. I've been trying to understand more of what I need to shift to and how that feels has been the biggest learning curve with that.

"But I think when you look at the tyre usage we've had, things have been a little bit different. I don't think anything has changed necessarily, but there's been something a bit different with the last couple of weekends compared to the majority of races."

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READERS COMMENTS

1. Posted by ffracer, 6 hours ago

"Well done, Oscar Piastri. Your best results are from your greatest team efforts.

Every driver that shows unwavering trust and respect towards his team extracts the absolute best from his team, unconditional fidelity and passion from each teammate into battle. Good luck in the fight. "

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2. Posted by Schrodinger's cat, 16 hours ago

"Piastri is saying that his team is treating him fairly. But, is that what he really thinks?"

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Piastri respects team's approach to title fight

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