Oscar Piastri isn’t buying the idea that the FIA’s early-season tidying-up of the 2026 power unit rules is about to hand McLaren a neat shortcut back to Mercedes.
Yes, there have been tweaks — and yes, any time the rulebook gets edited three races into a new engine era, customer teams will inevitably wonder if the works outfit has been living in a slightly different universe. But Piastri’s read is blunt: McLaren’s problem isn’t that the Mercedes power unit has suddenly become a secret weapon, it’s that the MCL40 simply isn’t producing the downforce to live with the silver car.
The backdrop is uncomfortable for McLaren. As reigning world champion, it arrived in Melbourne expecting to start 2026 with broadly comparable hardware to Mercedes given both are running the same HPP power unit. Instead, the opening round raised eyebrows when the Mercedes looked like it had more in hand — and not just in a “first race, odd track” kind of way.
Andrea Stella has already acknowledged McLaren expected closer parity. His language has also been telling: there’s an acceptance that Mercedes is extracting more from the package, and a frustration that the information flow between supplier and customer hasn’t met expectations.
“We have work to do to exploit the potential of the power unit,” Stella said at McLaren’s spring debrief, pointing to what HPP is managing to unlock. “What they are doing shows they understand a lot more, and maybe the flow of information hasn’t been as anticipated.”
Stella added that McLaren has been pushing the issue with HPP for weeks, describing a scenario where the team has felt reactive rather than predictive — a rare admission from a front-running outfit that prides itself on process. For a customer team, the line between “we’re sharing hardware” and “we’re sharing understanding” has always been where the political tension lives, and McLaren is essentially saying that line has become more visible in 2026.
It’s also happening as the FIA makes a handful of refinements to energy management with the new engines. In qualifying, maximum permitted recharge has been reduced from 8MJ to 7MJ, while peak ‘super clip’ power increases to 350kW. In the race, the maximum Boost is capped at +150kW, while MGU-K deployment is set to 350kW in key acceleration zones — corner exit to braking point, including overtaking zones — and limited to 250kW elsewhere. Race starts have also been addressed with a ‘low power start detection’ system designed to trigger automatic MGU-K deployment if a driver bogs down.
On paper, that looks like the FIA trying to reduce the extremes — the sort of smoothing-out that could, theoretically, narrow the gap between an engine programme that has nailed the control philosophy from day one and a customer still figuring out how to lean on it.
Piastri would love that to be the story. He just doesn’t think it is.
“I would love to say yes, but I don’t really think so,” he said. “I think Mercedes, they had a better understanding of the power unit and how to get the most out of it.”
The important part is what came next. Piastri pointed to Suzuka as a weekend where, on his side of the garage at least, McLaren felt it had largely wrung out what was available from its package — power unit included — and still couldn’t get close enough.
“In Japan… on my side of the garage, I thought we did a really good job of maximizing everything from the power unit to the car that we had,” he said. “But we’re clearly still a fair way behind on… downforce and performance from the chassis as well.
“I’m sure that gap in the power unit understanding will close a little bit, but our biggest deficit in Japan was not that we were lacking time from the power unit… it was that our car wasn’t as good as theirs. So, yeah, I think that’s the bigger piece of the puzzle.”
That’s a pretty revealing window into how McLaren is framing its own diagnosis internally: the engine operational side might be messy and, in Stella’s words, not as transparent as hoped — but the lap time that really matters is being left in the corners. And in a rules cycle like 2026, where energy deployment shapes how you approach a lap but aero efficiency still decides how fast you can rotate and how early you can commit, that distinction is everything.
The timing is also key. McLaren has had a rare breather between Japan and Miami, and Stella has made it clear the team is swinging hard. Not “a floor update and a new wing” hard — more like a reset.
“In our intent, there was always the idea to deliver sort of a completely new car… for the North American races,” Stella said, adding that the calendar change has helped teams streamline development rather than constantly firefighting between events. “Across Miami and Canada, we will see an entirely new MCL40.”
That’s a big statement in any season, let alone one where teams are still calibrating how to use their new power unit tools. It also underlines why Piastri isn’t wasting much energy on the FIA’s tweaks as a potential equaliser: McLaren doesn’t appear to believe it can regulation-change its way back into the fight. It needs a car that generates more load, behaves more predictably, and gives its drivers something they can lean on — because right now, even a perfectly managed hybrid system won’t disguise a chassis that’s coming up light.
