Oscar Piastri walked out of Miami with the sort of weekend that usually invites big statements about momentum and “turning points”. He wasn’t biting.
McLaren’s step forward at the Miami Grand Prix was impossible to miss — a Sprint 1-2 on outright pace, and then two cars parked on the grand prix podium alongside Kimi Antonelli. The team’s MCL40 arrived with seven new parts, headlined by a completely new floor, and the immediate effect was that Ferrari’s early-season habit of hoovering up podiums finally got interrupted.
But Piastri’s read is that the story isn’t “McLaren are back” as much as “let’s see what happens when Mercedes actually plays its cards”.
“It’s going to be interesting to see,” Piastri said when asked about the pecking order. “I think, we kind of need to see where we stack up at a few different tracks.”
Miami, for McLaren, was the clearest evidence yet that its upgrade direction is working. After a season that had promised more than it delivered in patches, the team didn’t just look quicker in one phase — it looked sturdier across a weekend that included a Sprint and a grand prix. Lando Norris put the car on pole for the Sprint and converted it into a win, Piastri followed him home, and Sunday ended with the pair second and third behind Antonelli.
“The car has been a really good step forward,” Piastri said earlier in the weekend. “To be able to have that kind of pace as well has been a welcome return to form.”
There’s a reason he’s careful with the “return to form” line, though. McLaren outscored Mercedes in Miami — 48 points to 45 — the first time it’s done so this season. Yet Mercedes’ result came with an asterisk in the paddock, because it’s widely understood the Brackley team didn’t bring its main upgrade to Florida. Just two new parts appeared on the W17 there, with the bigger package held back for Montreal.
Piastri made that subtext explicit. McLaren took a big swing in Miami; Mercedes hasn’t yet.
“We expected the upgrades to be a good step forward, and they have been, and hopefully they are again in Canada,” he said. “But obviously Mercedes didn’t bring a lot this weekend, and they also have an upgrade package for Canada, so we’ll have to wait and see how much that’s worth for them.”
The nuance matters because Miami can flatter certain traits. A new floor can transform not just downforce numbers but how a car behaves in the messy stuff — traction phases, mid-corner balance, how confidently a driver can lean on the rear when the tyre starts to go away. McLaren’s upgrade clearly gave Norris and Piastri something they could attack with, and in a Sprint format that can amplify raw pace, that was a significant tell.
Even so, the next test arrives quickly and it’s one McLaren isn’t pretending will be straightforward. Norris, buoyed by the Miami gains, still framed Montreal as the moment where the championship’s shape might shift again — not because McLaren expects to go backwards, but because Mercedes are expected to go forwards.
“Certainly,” Norris said when asked if the weekend made him optimistic. “I think you’d have to feel silly if you don’t feel confident about the future when we improved so much this weekend.”
Then came the caveat — and it sounded like a driver who’s been around long enough to know how cruel F1’s week-to-week swings can be.
“We also know it’s a track that suits us,” he said of Miami. “I’m always that guy that looks at things on the slightly more glass-half-empty side, but this is a track that suits us and in the past has not suited the Mercedes quite so well. Yet they were still very fast, and we’re going to go to a track that Mercedes have probably been the best at over the last five, six years. So, we have to wait and see.”
That’s the undercurrent heading into Canada: McLaren finally landed a meaningful development hit, but the competitive picture may still be missing a key data point until Mercedes’ Montreal package runs in anger. Piastri’s view — shared quietly by more than a few in the paddock — is that Miami was encouraging, not definitive.
And Norris, for all the optimism, didn’t sound interested in pretending one strong weekend solves a season.
“I know we’re bringing upgrades, but in Formula 1 it’s too easy to judge things over one race,” he said. “You need to see how you are over a number of races and different styles of track: street circuits, hot tracks, cold tracks, tight and twisty, fast circuits. So, there’s no point getting ahead of ourselves.
“We’ve had a very good weekend, I’m very proud of the team, but I also want to make sure they keep pushing and keep trying to improve things, because we still need that.”
Miami might prove to be McLaren’s breakthrough. Or it might end up as the weekend it showed its hand first — and dared Mercedes to respond. Montreal will tell us which version of that story we’re getting.
