Nine days of testing isn’t much at the best of times. In 2026, with a new engine formula and one of the biggest technical resets F1’s ever attempted, it’s barely a snapshot. Still, even snapshots can show who’s framed the picture best — and, more intriguingly, who might be about to spend the opening rounds chasing it.
Rob Smedley’s read from Bahrain was that a “clear group” has begun to separate itself at the front, and the reigning world champions at McLaren aren’t quite leading it. Not far away, but not setting the pace either — which is about as uncomfortable a place as you can be when everybody’s climbing the same steep development curve.
Testing “numbers” always come with the usual health warning. Barcelona ran behind closed doors and, depending on who you listen to, Mercedes left that phase looking ominously tidy. By the time the paddock rolled into Bahrain and started hinting a little more loudly, Ferrari had grabbed the headline lap: Charles Leclerc’s 1:31.992, a chunky eight-tenths clear of Kimi Antonelli. Jolyon Palmer, though, wasn’t buying it as a straight shootout, suggesting Mercedes may not have felt the need to turn the wick up on low fuel at all — the kind of confidence flex teams don’t do unless the baseline is strong.
What’s been interesting about this first proper look at the new era is that the “quick” stories haven’t all come from the stopwatch. Red Bull’s brand-new Red Bull-Ford power unit didn’t just circulate — it *worked*, and that matters. The lap count was there, and so was the impression that its energy deployment is already in a good window, which is an early-season weapon under these regulations even before you get into the aerodynamics.
Ferrari, meanwhile, has left the paddock talking about execution: sharp launches off the line, and a car that’s clearly sparked a few technical conversations in garages up and down the pitlane. Mercedes’ biggest statement, though, may simply have been that it looked boring — in the best way. Reliable, repeatable, and seemingly untroubled.
Against that backdrop, McLaren’s test read like a team that turned up with a solid hand — but perhaps not the best one at the table. Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris ended Bahrain third and fourth on the outright timesheet, around nine-tenths off Leclerc. Again, it’s testing, and nine-tenths in February doesn’t guarantee nine-tenths in Melbourne. But the other datapoint is harder to wave away: McLaren sat fourth on lap count with 395, compared to Mercedes’ 432. Not disastrous, not panic stations — just slightly less of the clean mileage you want when everyone’s still mapping out the behaviours of brand-new cars and brand-new power units.
Smedley’s assessment was blunt, if not alarmist.
“From the Bahrain test, there was… a clear group emerging at the front,” he said. In his view Mercedes “look very strong” heading into the season, with Red Bull right there and potentially “the edge on race pace”. Ferrari, he added, has “done a great job” and looks like it’ll be “there or thereabouts”.
Then came the bit McLaren won’t love reading back: from testing, Smedley felt the champions were “just a little bit off the back of that top three”. The important caveat was the second half of the sentence — “but not far away”.
That’s the nuance that matters, because 2026 isn’t going to reward anyone for winning February. The regulations are so fresh that what you learn — and how quickly you turn that learning into lap time — will swing weekends far more violently than in a mature rules cycle. A team can arrive in Australia looking like it’s got a small problem and arrive three races later looking like it never had one. Or vice versa.
Smedley underlined that point too, calling the ruleset “so immature” that development becomes everything. It’s not a comfortable thought for teams who start on the back foot, but it’s also a warning shot to anyone thinking they’ve cracked it: the order you see at the first race is unlikely to survive the season intact, simply because the development curve will be steep enough to redraw the map by the time F1 gets to Abu Dhabi.
McLaren’s situation, then, is less “champions in trouble” and more “champions denied the luxury of cruising”. If the early picture is accurate — Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari shading the front — it forces McLaren into a familiar modern F1 reality: you either bring upgrades that genuinely move the needle, or you get dragged into the kind of knife-fight where weekends are decided by marginal gains and execution rather than inherent pace.
There was one more nugget in Smedley’s comments that should keep the rest of the grid attentive: he hinted the midfield is “shaken-up” and could be “edging towards” that leading group. Under a reset like this, it only takes one team to interpret the brief a little more cleverly than the others, and suddenly the top table gets crowded.
So if McLaren looks a touch “there and thereabouts” right now, that may be the story — not that it’s suddenly forgotten how to build a fast car, but that 2026 might not offer the comfort of clear air at the front. The champions may have to do it the hard way this time: develop aggressively, execute flawlessly, and assume nothing about where they really stand until the points-paying laps begin.
