McLaren urged to hold serious discussion to avoid a 'furious Zak Brown'

Ralf Schumacher believes McLaren needs to "sit down" with Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris before the pair insight the wrath of CEO Zak Brown.

The F1 driver feels the dynamic between the two drivers' championship rivals could end in tears without intervention from management at the Woking-based squad.

After 14 rounds into the season, Piastri leads Norris by nine points in the standings, but they came perilously close to colliding in the recent Hungarian Grand Prix.

The latter held on to triumph at the Hungaroring, making use of the alternate one-stop strategy, but the former almost ended both their afternoons with a late lunge at the start of the penultimate lap, locking up and robbing McLaren of its 200th grand prix victory.

Schumacher, who raced in F1 for Jordan, Williams and Toyota between 1997 and 2007, suggested the nexus of the budding tensions is that Piastri's manager, Mark Webber, would have had grand designs on his driver joining the papaya team and being its "superhero."

In reality, the reigning constructors' champions continue to insist on parity between Norris and the Australian, something team principal Andrea Stella and Brown pride themselves on.

"You see how much pressure there is," Schumacher said on Sky Sports Germany's F1 podcast Backstage Boxengasse.

"If you just looked at Mark Webber, Piastri's manager, he was anything but enthusiastic, because he obviously wants him to overtake Norris as well.

"Look, Norris is a great driver, and he can certainly become world champion, but nobody in the team thinks he is Max Verstappen or anything like that.

"So Webber will have thought that Piastri would join the team and then be the superhero. That does something to a guy like that."

Addressing the near miss on Lap 69 of the Hungarian Grand Prix, the six-time grand prix winner labelled the fact they did not collide "more luck than wisdom" and cautioned there could be a "furious" Brown on TV before the end of the campaign.

"It's really more luck than wisdom that those two didn't hit each other," he added. "That's why I think they all need to sit down and slow down a bit.

"Otherwise, at some point, we're going to have a furious Zak Brown in front of the camera because they drove each other off the track."