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McLaren’s 2026 Reboot: Bugs Bite, Piastri Bites Back

McLaren’s first proper taste of 2026 machinery in Barcelona was always going to be more about survival than swagger, and Oscar Piastri’s Thursday underlined why. His penultimate day of the opening pre-season test ended with the MCL40 pulled apart in the garage after a fuel-system problem curtailed the programme — the sort of unglamorous issue teams expected when F1’s biggest rules reset in a generation finally hit the track.

Piastri managed 48 laps before the interruption bit hard enough to end meaningful running. On the timing screens he was fourth on the day, 1.974s adrift of George Russell’s Mercedes benchmark, but the lap time was almost beside the point. These cars are new in the ways that matter: new chassis philosophies, new power units and, crucially, new habits drivers have to build around energy deployment and management. A lost afternoon in week one is painful precisely because it’s the boring laps — repeated procedures, consistent stints, correlation work — that turn an unfamiliar package into something you can race.

“It was nice to be back out and especially in a new car,” Piastri said, before conceding the obvious frustration. “Unfortunately, a few issues today. We had a fuel systems issue, which cut our day a bit short, but I know the team’s working really hard to get that fixed and get us back out for as many laps as we can tomorrow.”

McLaren had already played catch-up in Barcelona after confirming it would miss the start of the test. When the MCL40 did finally roll out on Wednesday, it was Lando Norris — now the reigning world champion — who shook it down, completing 76 laps and ending day three third-fastest. Thursday was meant to be Piastri’s chance to start building his own reference bank with the new-era car; instead, he got a compressed version of the learning curve.

Still, the tone from the cockpit wasn’t doom-and-gloom. If anything, Piastri sounded energised by the scale of the challenge, leaning into the reality that everyone is effectively re-learning their job. “They’re all completely different cars, completely different engines to what we’ve had for the last three or four years,” he said. “That’s part of what this test is about and I think we’ve already identified a few things we can try and improve on the car to make it feel a bit nicer.

“They’re all going to be different to what we’ve had, so just trying to find all the bugs, all the problems, and then try and make the car faster. It’s definitely been a challenge and exciting.”

That word — “bugs” — is doing plenty of heavy lifting this week. Early 2026 testing has the feel of a systems check as much as a performance shootout. New power unit behaviour changes how the car breathes over a lap; less downforce changes how you approach corners; and the “process” parts — how you run the car, how you recover, how you deploy — are suddenly central rather than background noise.

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Piastri’s comments hinted at where the early lap time is going to come from once reliability stops being the headline: detail work, and plenty of it. “There’s a lot of areas where you can be a point of difference and make a point of difference now, which is exciting,” he said. “You’ve got to put in the hard work to make that happen.

“There’s going to be some aspects of these cars that we’ve never really had to do before in our careers, so there’s plenty of lessons to be learned.”

The interesting subtext here is that McLaren doesn’t sound spooked by what it’s found. Mark Temple, the team’s technical director of performance, described the day as a step forward despite the reduced mileage — and, crucially, suggested the car’s behaviour matched expectation. In an era where simulation-to-track correlation can make or break the first half of a season, that’s not a small thing to say this early.

“Second day on track with positives to take away,” Temple said. “We’ve got a good understanding of where the car is from a baseline point of view.

“In this shakedown, the most important aspect for drivers is that they understand how the new car operates, how the power unit interacts and the process of energy management. Oscar now has some good reference points for that, as well as a feel for how the chassis behaves.

“Overall, we haven’t encountered anything too unexpected. The behaviour and handling of the car is in line with what we thought, so nothing is catching the drivers out.”

Temple also laid out why McLaren didn’t try to brute-force its way past the fault with a quick fix. “The car is very complex, so we decided to bring the car back into the garage and strip it down to fully understand where the problem is coming from ahead of tomorrow’s running,” he said — an early-season reminder that this test is supposed to be ruthless about finding weaknesses, not heroic about hiding them.

For Piastri, the priority on the final day is straightforward: rebuild the rhythm the issue stole, and make the car’s “different” feel start to make sense. “Just trying to get a better feel for what the car is like,” he said. “There’s such a big departure from what we’ve had the last few years and all of my time in F1.

“Obviously there’s new engines to understand, but just the philosophy of the car is completely different as well and less downforce. So just getting used to that and how different things feel… find a good direction to make the car quicker and feel nice.”

McLaren will insist it’s early — because it is — but the real clock starts now. With Bahrain looming as the first true performance read, Barcelona’s value is in gathering enough clean, boring data to arrive with confidence that the fundamentals are right. A fuel-system glitch in January is survivable; turning up to the opener still chasing basic gremlins is how promising seasons quietly bleed away.

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