Lando Norris ended McLaren's wait for a 2026 win in Hungary. Oscar Piastri, who led the opening lap, retired on lap 56 with a gearbox failure and goes into the summer break seventh in the drivers' championship, on the wrong side of a set of numbers that have hardened all season: Norris leads him 7-4 in grand prix qualifying and 4-0 in sprint qualifying, with a 4-0 lead in sprint results.
For David Croft, that is now a competitive problem McLaren has to answer rather than a run of bad weekends.
"Oscar Piastri is a fine, fine driver, but in 2026, he finds himself not having the pace of his teammate," the Sky Sports commentator said on The F1 Show. "Not just in Budapest, but I think consistently over race weekends, he hasn't had as much pace as Lando."
McLaren has run two number one drivers since Piastri arrived at Woking, and through the 2025 title fight the policy held. Croft's argument is that the team no longer has the margin for it, sitting somewhere between second and fourth fastest depending on the circuit.
"McLaren have got to give both drivers as big a chance as they can to do as well as they can, but they can't ignore the fact that one driver is going to go on and win the race and the other's going to come under pressure if they keep him out in front," he said.
Notably, Croft did not criticise how McLaren actually raced in Hungary. Norris asked to undercut Piastri and the pit wall refused; he passed him on merit instead.
"I think McLaren actually did a decent job with the strategy," Croft said. "I didn't see anything to complain about, but Oscar's got to find a way to match Lando's pace. If he can't, then I think McLaren, with Mercedes as fragile as they are and Ferrari's strategy as fragile as it is, have got to find every way to maximise every advantage."
"Lando actually seemed happier to let the car slide around a little bit more than Oscar, who wasn't enjoying his feeling of grip on the hard tyre," Palmer said.
The mechanism, in Palmer's view, was in the entry phase rather than the exit. "More critically, it seemed Lando's style of slowing the car down and rotating it earlier meant that he prioritised the slower-speed corner exits and was enjoying more straight-line traction, rather than combined forces, which Oscar leant on more."
That diagnosis matters because it is the same weakness that undid Piastri late in 2025: difficulty extracting performance when the rear end slides, particularly on low-grip surfaces.
Piastri's own account, given to McLaren in a mid-season interview, neither disputes the deficit nor treats it as a matter of confidence. He frames 2026 as a rebuild of his driving.
"Definitely up and down," he said of the first half. "I think our kind of general level of performance has not been quite where we want it to be, obviously. We've come close to some victories and had a few podiums, which has been good, but we obviously set the bar pretty high last year."
He is unusually direct about the scale of the reset the new regulations demanded. "This regulation change has been like a completely fundamental change to how you drive a race car, in some ways. It's been a huge reset for us, for me as well. I've had to tackle things in different ways and change the way I go about some things."
He points to Austria, where he finished fourth after a difficult weekend in Barcelona, as the moment the rethink started paying. "It's quite easy to just settle into your normal rhythm and do the things you've always done, but that doesn't always work in these cars," he said. "In Austria I felt like I really had to stretch myself a bit more and try some new things."
There is one silver lining he identifies in being out of the title fight, and it cuts against Croft's urgency. "The stakes aren't quite as high at the moment as what they were, especially compared to last year," Piastri said. "There's a little bit less pressure, which means you're able to try new things and experiment a little bit more."
So the three readings pull in different directions. Croft wants a decision made now to protect the constructors' championship. Palmer suggests the problem is technical and therefore fixable without one. Piastri is betting on the second, with simulator work planned over the break and the Dutch Grand Prix on 23 August as the first marker.
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*Originally published on [Newsformula One](https://newsformula.one/article/croft-wants-mclaren-to-back-norris-palmer-explains-why-piastri-slipped). Visit for full coverage.*