McLaren arrived in 2026 as the team to beat. It leaves Barcelona without a single Grand Prix win to its name, its drivers trailing a Mercedes it used to out-develop. How a double world champion fell this far, this fast, is the question splitting analysts and former drivers alike.
The hard numbers frame it. As The Race laid out, world champion Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri have scored fewer points between them this season than Mercedes title leader Kimi Antonelli has managed on his own. A couple of podiums each, a Norris win in the Miami sprint, and little else.
The Race traces the collapse to F1's new engine rules, which have swung the advantage back to manufacturer teams and left McLaren paying for its customer status with Mercedes for the first time since 2021. Mercedes, the analysis argued, was simply quicker to unlock the subtle performance in the new power units, while McLaren spent the opening rounds chasing information it didn't have — and managing a run of failures. China cost both cars a start through an electrical problem; Norris needed a new battery in Japan, lost a gearbox in Canada and an internal combustion engine in Monaco.
Team principal Andrea Stella has refused to pin it all on the engine. "We have had issues pretty much in all areas of the car," he said after Monaco, framing reliability as a whole-car problem rather than a Mercedes one. His stated priority now is to "retain the standards of a championship-winning partnership." McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown has gone a step further, admitting the team will "at least conduct a preliminary evaluation" of building toward its own engine when F1 settles its 2030 rules — even as staying a Mercedes customer remains the plan.
On Sky's F1 Show, Jacques Villeneuve read it differently: less a structural crisis than a team still carrying the cost of last year's title fight. He was unstinting about Norris, who he said was "driving like a champion," wringing everything out of a car that no longer wins. The worry, Villeneuve added, is how fine the margins have become. "If you have two or three tenths difference, this could mean a podium or seventh or eighth. And that's how the group is in the middle."
Norris himself has hinted at a deeper cause. As Sky's Matt Amos noted, the champion has suggested McLaren's drawn-out 2025 fight with Max Verstappen meant the team "focused an awful lot on that and didn't prepare as much for this year."
Not everyone buys the decline narrative. Going through the Barcelona telemetry, the analyst behind Formula Insights argued McLaren's pace was better than the result flattered — Norris ran "pretty much on par with George Russell," his recovery podium "relatively well-deserved." And on the day McLaren's supposed weakness should have shown up most, the data didn't: the team, he said, "do not seem to have tyre issues there." His read cut against the gloom — "don't count McLaren out."
The one thing all three voices agree on is the split inside the garage. Piastri's Barcelona was, in Formula Insights' words, flat; Norris keeps hauling the car toward the front. Whether McLaren's slump is an engine problem, a preparation problem or just a bruising patch, Austria will start to tell which read is right.
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