Racing
© Jonathan Borba
McLaren says its difficult start to the 2026 Formula 1 season was driven by reliability trouble and the cost of chasing both 2025 titles to the final race, even as the reigning champion team believes Suzuka showed the first signs of a recovery.
After three rounds, McLaren sits third in the constructors’ championship on 46 points, 80 behind Mercedes. The damage was done early. Oscar Piastri failed to start in Australia and China, while Lando Norris also did not make the start in Shanghai, with all three non-starts caused by electrical problems linked to the power unit before the race.
Andrea Stella, McLaren team principal, said the team’s slow opening came from two main causes. “The first part of the season presented some challenges, essentially for two reasons,” Stella said. “The first is that it took longer than expected to learn how to harness the full potential offered by the power unit.” He added that McLaren also “suffered from various reliability issues in this area,” which hurt both results and the pace of learning.
Stella said the second cause dated back to last year’s championship fight. “The design phase of the MCL40 was affected both by the fact that we continued to fight for the championship right up to the final race in 2025 and by a different approach to design,” he said. McLaren chose to make the launch version of the car “a healthy platform for development” under the new 2026 regulations, but that left it starting the season behind the Mercedes W17 and Ferrari SF-26.
“These, in short, are the reasons why we found ourselves trailing behind rivals such as Mercedes and Ferrari, who arrived better prepared than us at the first round of the season,” Stella said.
That made Piastri’s second place at Suzuka more significant than a first podium alone. Stella called it evidence that the team has started to turn a corner. “We have seen in Suzuka the first signs of progress,” he said, adding that “the development rate of the car looks very promising,” even if reliability and performance still need further work.
Norris had already made clear before the Japanese Grand Prix that McLaren would not rethink the trade-off it accepted by winning in 2025. Asked whether he would prefer a stronger car now, he said: “The real question you probably ask is, would I rather be here and have won last year, or would I rather have a slightly better car now and not have won last year, and I think you know what my answer would be.”
He also backed the team to close the gap. Norris said McLaren has updates planned for Miami after the five-week break in the calendar and stressed that the team still expects to move forward. “We’re still the third-best team at the minute, but we certainly enjoy being first a lot more than third,” Norris said. “We’ve got some things in the pipeline, and like I said, everyone’s working hard, so we’re ambitious to get back to the top.”