It wasn’t meant to go like this for Australia’s Oscar Piastri. After a valiant intra-team fight with Lando Norris that took the Championship to the closing moments of the 2025 season, the Melbourne driver would have no doubt looked to 2026 as the opportunity to further stake his claim at McLaren; that he was next in line for a maiden Formula 1 Championship.
But as we reach the halfway point of the season, Piastri finds himself treading uneven ground at the front of the chasing pack – still ahead of the struggling Red Bull drivers, but far enough from the final podium to start looking to 2027.
It’s not exactly an isolated incident. Defending champion Norris is also struggling with the MCL40, with the new regs reshuffling the status quo once more. For a team that got so used to winning last season, zero in 10 is a painful return for the 2025 Constructors’ champions.
McLaren spent the back half of 2025 fighting Max Verstappen for a title that went down to the wire, which meant real development hours stayed parked on the MCL39 long after Ferrari and Mercedes had turned the lights off on their old cars and gone all-in on 2026.
Team principal Andrea Stella has more or less admitted as much. Worse, McLaren's early concept for this year's rules needed what Stella diplomatically called "redirecting," which in more covert terms means the aero philosophy underpinning the whole car was wrong from the jump.
Unfortunately, for the guys and girls back at the MTC, it’s not exactly an overnight fix – more like a matter of months to unpick, test, retest, and implement.
And it shows: Mercedes’ two drivers have taken the role that Norris and Piastri occupied so well last year (team orders, anyone?) and have been walking away with the season while McLaren sits roughly three or four tenths adrift through the corners.
Under the hood, McLaren still runs Mercedes power units, and even there it's coming up short with the way the hybrid system is being extracted. Same engine as other Mercedes teams, but McLaren isn't squeezing as much power out of it.
Reliability hasn't helped the cause either: Norris is already on his fourth power electronics unit of the year, with terminal failures in China and Monaco forcing a ten-place grid penalty at Spa. When your title defence is being undercut by the same brain box failing three times in ten races, it's hard to pin everything on rivals simply raising their game.
Yet Norris, for all McLaren's struggles, is still beating his teammate – just. And that could be down to the way that the new engine regulations reward drivers who brake late and hard.
Harder braking means more energy harvested and more in the bank to deploy down the next straight. Piastri's style has always looked rather different. The famously cool character takes his time with a smoother, later-on-the-brakes style that used to spare his tyres and win him races.
But the new regs mean his driving style isn’t generating the same electrical energy that his teammate is banking lap after lap.
Of course, McLaren is the architect of its own slump, fielding a car that started on the wrong idea and an engine partnership that’s not reaching its potential. When you take two issues compounded with a driver whose own style doesn’t maximise energy – something that, rightly or wrongly, has been the difference all season – and you can start to see the picture forming for the defending Constructors’ Champions.
And with rumour swirling that a blockbuster driver swap between OP and Max Verstappen is on the cards, perhaps now might as good a time as any to make the switch to Red Bull in search of that maiden title.