Oscar Piastri isn’t buying into the idea that McLaren will roll into Albert Park and pick up where it left off 12 months ago.
As Formula 1 edges towards the first race of its new technical era, the early mood in Bahrain has been familiar: everyone’s trying to look calm while scanning the timing screens for reassurance, and no-one wants to be the one handing out the “favourites” label. Piastri, speaking after the opening three days of testing, struck a note that will sound cautious to a fanbase that remembers how emphatically McLaren started 2025.
Back then, Melbourne was a statement weekend. Lando Norris won on the road to the world title, resisting Max Verstappen’s pressure, and McLaren looked like it had a buffer over its closest rivals. Piastri’s own Sunday was a scrappier story — a wet-race spin that left him down in ninth — but the underlying picture was clear: McLaren had turned up with a package that worked immediately.
That’s not the scenario he’s expecting in 2026.
“Where we are in the pecking order, I don’t know,” Piastri said in Bahrain. The best he’ll commit to, at this stage, is that the paddock’s old hierarchy still broadly holds: McLaren, Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari appear to be the front four again. Exactly how those four stack up, though, remains anyone’s guess.
And the key point, from Piastri’s perspective, is that this season’s reset has moved the goalposts for everyone. New-look cars and new engines have arrived, and the sport has inevitably entered that phase where outright pace is tangled up with correlation, reliability, and the sort of teething problems that only surface when you really start leaning on the hardware.
If the Australian Grand Prix were suddenly brought forward to tomorrow, he doesn’t see McLaren repeating its 2025 level of superiority.
“I certainly don’t think it’ll be the Australian Grand Prix we had last year, unfortunately, in terms of performance,” he said. “Hopefully it’s a bit different in terms of results. But yeah, we’re certainly not going to come out and have the performance we had in Melbourne last year.”
It’s a telling bit of framing: Piastri separating “performance” from “results” hints at what testing in a new era often becomes. Teams can look rapid while masking weaknesses, or look ordinary while quietly solving the problems that matter. The first race has a habit of rewarding whoever arrives with the fewest question marks, not necessarily whoever flashed the quickest single lap on day two in Bahrain.
Piastri’s wider point was that the margins are unusually volatile right now. In established regulations, teams obsess over hundredths and the difference between a good weekend and a bad one can be a minor set-up misread. In an overhaul year, the performance swings are bigger and more brutal.
“There’s so many things now that all the teams need to still sort out, need to get right,” he said. “The difference between getting these things right and wrong is not a few hundredths of a second, or even a few tenths of a second. It’s a lot. It’s upwards of half a second, sometimes, if it goes really wrong.”
That’s the reality of 2026: the cars are new, the power units are new, and the workflows are new. Even when a team believes it has a strong baseline, it’s still trying to work out which issues are fundamental and which can be engineered away with updates, calibration, or simply more mileage. Piastri admitted McLaren is still separating “inherent” limitations from the sort of problems that can be cleaned up overnight — and, crucially, which can be fixed before Melbourne.
“We probably don’t even know what our true pace is, because we don’t know what problems are just inherent that we can’t fix,” he said. “We don’t know what problems we can fix tomorrow. We don’t know what problems we can fix for race one.”
His final line landed with the sort of honesty you usually only get in February: “I think all 11 teams will be having similar thoughts.”
McLaren will, of course, still arrive in Australia with expectation attached — it comes with being a title-winning operation led by a champion in Norris and a driver in Piastri who’s long since outgrown the “promising” label. But Piastri’s message is that 2026 isn’t going to reward nostalgia. Whatever advantage McLaren had at the start of last year doesn’t automatically carry over, and the pecking order within the leading group is likely to be fluid early on.
There are three more days of Bahrain testing still to come before the circus packs up for Melbourne. By then, the lap times will be sharper, the long runs will be a little more representative, and the teams will have had a chance to hide a little less.
Whether that translates into a McLaren that’s ready to fight at the front straight away — or merely ready to join the scrap — is exactly the kind of uncertainty Piastri is trying to underline. In 2026, being quick is only part of the job. Being ready might be the bigger one.
