2026 McLaren Mastercard F1 Team

[Watto]

How did we lose Piastri and Hadjar?

Piastri crashed on his reconnaissance lap. Didn't even make the start. Mix of driver mistake and car, put him in the wall

Hadjar blown engine.

[Darth-Piekus]

I see.

[_cerber1]

Considering that McLaren is a couple of updates behind, has extra weight and has a poor understanding of the engine, the start of the season can be called good.

[f1Follower]

[Slahinki]

This is going to be a rough couple of years. The cars look great, but these PUs are really not doing it for me. At all. Way too much battery management, causing it at times to look like multi-class racing, the abhorrent clipping and somehow they sound worse than what they did last year though that could be down to mic placement. This is no good.

The team is around where we expected, so well done to Lando for holding off Max and grabbing a good fistfull of points.

[Darth-Piekus]

That looked like some kind of car error for Piastri.

[SmallSoldier]

Race 1 over… Way too early to draw many conclusions, surprised that Lando was able to hold off Max all through the last part of the race, after all that talk about Drag, Gear Ratios, etc… It seems that he wasn’t the sitting duck some expected him to be on the straights.

Melbourne is a bit of an unrepresentative track, definitely not the norm… The team will continue to learn about the new PU, understanding what Mercedes is doing will be a big plus and the best benchmark they can have.

[McFAN]

First race of the season and we can safely say we are 3rd fastest team.

RedBull is probably infront.

I'm not convinced, while Max did look quicker in the final stint
he did chew through his tires and fell away quite badly at the end,
So remains to be seen.

[SmallSoldier]

Does anyone in the McLaren think that Mercedes is using compression ratio trick in their engine? If not then what was the point of starting the tests for engine from June 1st why not from 1st March and be done with the legality of their engine from start

Even if the engine is legal as of today, there is nothing for them to win by forcing a new test right now, no benefit whatsoever

[Darth-Piekus]

Allow me to disagree on the 4th team also. Norris did manage to hold Max behind and we dont really know how the battle between Piasti and Hadjar would go as he never started.

[Watto]

First race of the season and we can safely say we are 3rd fastest team.

RedBull is probably infront.

I'm not convinced, while Max did look quicker in the final stint
he did chew through his tires and fell away quite badly at the end,
So remains to be seen.

Probably not a lot between McLaren and RBR for now both probably have their strengths and weaknesses but both a fair way behind Ferrari and Mercedes. Maybe interesting to see how Max would have gone had he not crashed in qualifying and started near the front .

[Watto]

That looked like some kind of car error for Piastri.

A big of both, they were syncing the gears and seemed a little battery issue Oscar seemed focused on that and then got a. little caught out think had he been on full concentration he probably is okay and starts the race with a bit of a scare.

[elldizzle]

Feel like McL started to learn a bit about how to use the energy deployment in the 2ns stint. Definitely used all the tools to defend from Verstappen. Norris will take some good learning from this. McL will get there with unlocking what Mercedes are doing with the deployment.

[AR3-GP]

Feel like McL started to learn a bit about how to use the energy deployment in the 2ns stint. Definitely used all the tools to defend from Verstappen. Norris will take some good learning from this. McL will get there with unlocking what Mercedes are doing with the deployment.

Think it's naive to think it's just deployment. Norris was munching through his tires in the 1st and 2nd stint. Mercs were lapping near 1 second quicker with 20+ lap older tires.

[Emag]

It's pretty much what we saw in testing. McLaren were about half a second down on Ferrari with way worse deg.
They matched a detuned RedBull in day 3 of the second week at Bahrain, so it's not a big surprise to see RedBull with an edge here running full power.
Although RedBull also seemingly had some bad deg with Max as well.

So basically, if they want to win a race this year, they need to find a second per lap while also improving deg. Should be easy