Brown happy for all but one rival: 'We like George, Hamilton's win was cool'

Zak Brown was clearly satisfied with Oscar Piastri taking pole position for the Chinese Grand Prix, but he was also complimentary of other frontrunner teams. The American praised both George Russell and Lewis Hamilton in Shanghai. All but one rival gets this treatment from him.

McLaren looked to be on course to claim the first row of the grid in Shanghai, similarly to how they did in Melbourne a weekend ago. This time, it was Piastri who claimed P1 for the Sunday, however, with his final lap, Russell and Mercedes managed to shoot up to second place in qualifying, separating the two Woking-based cars.

"That was an epic lap by George [Russell], I just said to Toto [Wolff], great to have three Mercedes[-powered cars] at the front. That was a big lap. Yes, I mean based on what we've seen, you kind of would have expected it to be Max or even the Ferraris, but cool to have George up there, we like George," the McLaren CEO told Sky Sports after the second session of the day.

Earlier on, it was Lewis Hamilton who managed to convert his sprint qualifying pole position in to Ferrari's first ever Sprint victory, since it was introduced back in 2021. "Very cool to see Lewis win. So if it's not one of our guys, Lewis in a Ferrari, former McLaren guy, he's always welcome at the McLaren family. We love racing Ferraris, so yes, to see Lewis win is pretty special, and he's qualified well, so he's certainly settling in quickly at Ferrari which we expected him to," Brown added, praising the seven-time world champion.

Out of McLaren's frontrunning rivals, therefore both Ferrari and Mercedes were ticked off the list. One team are missing however: Red Bull Racing. In an interview with The Telegraph that was released earlier this week, the CEO was less enthusiastic about Christian Horner, compared to 'having a talk with Toto' and 'we love racing Ferraris'. Brown explained there is 'no love lost there', and also predicted that Max Verstappen will leave the team already next season.

Want more Formula 1? Then follow GPblog on our various social media channels!

X | Instagram | TikTok | YouTube