Oscar Piastri isn’t buying the idea that Ferrari are the team to fear when the lights go out in 2026. Sitting on the second row for Saturday’s 23-lap Sprint at the Canadian Grand Prix, the McLaren driver sounded more interested in what’s happening ahead than in the red cars lining up behind.
The grid for the Sprint has a neat, old-school symmetry to it: George Russell and Kimi Antonelli on the front row, Piastri and Lando Norris just behind, then Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc in fifth and sixth. Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar follow. With the top four teams arranged in pairs, Turn 1 at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve is always going to be busy — but Piastri’s view is that McLaren’s baseline on launch has been strong enough that it shouldn’t become a rearward-looking exercise.
“Our starts have been better than the Ferraris’ all year, so we’re confident in ours,” Piastri said to Sky Sports. And while Ferrari’s reputation for sharp getaways has lingered around the paddock through the opening phase of this new rules era, Piastri’s wording was telling: this isn’t bravado, it’s the sort of calm certainty that comes when a team knows it’s ticked the fundamentals.
That matters more than ever in 2026, because the start has become a different problem to solve. With the MGU-H removed under the new power unit regulations, teams lost a tool that had quietly been doing a lot of heavy lifting in the first few seconds of a race: smoothing turbo response and masking lag at low revs. Without it, getting the engine and turbo in the right place for the start procedure is a more delicate, more time-sensitive operation — and the margins are there to be exploited.
In Ferrari’s case, the paddock chatter has been that it designed an engine concept with a smaller turbo, allowing it to settle into its preferred start configuration earlier than rivals, including Mercedes. That’s the sort of niche advantage you’d expect teams to chase in year one of a new power unit cycle: not glamorous, not always obvious on TV, but potentially decisive in the only part of the race where everyone is bunched and vulnerable.
The twist is that Ferrari’s edge hasn’t gone unchallenged — not by competitors directly, but via the FIA. The governing body introduced a blue-light warning to alert drivers that the start procedure was about to begin, a subtle but meaningful change that reduced the chance of one team catching others out in the choreography. Then, in Miami, the FIA went further by implementing a ‘low power start detection’ system. If a car is judged to be low on acceleration shortly after the driver releases the clutch, the system triggers automatic MGU-K deployment.
For Ferrari, it’s exactly the kind of intervention that stings: you make an early, clever call on hardware and operational detail, only for the environment around it to shift. Fred Vasseur didn’t hide his frustration.
“Politically, [it] was well played but not very fair,” he said to The Race. Vasseur accepted the FIA’s position that safety was the driver, but made the point that Ferrari’s concept had been developed with a particular set of criteria in mind — and that those criteria effectively moved late in the day. “For us, it’s also a choice that we made. We developed an engine with a criteria and somehow they changed the rule at the last minute.”
That’s the undercurrent heading into Montreal’s Sprint: not simply who gets the best launch, but how quickly the field converges once the rule-makers start sanding down the sharp edges of early innovation.
From McLaren’s perspective, the picture is simpler. Piastri isn’t dismissing Ferrari’s potential to make life awkward — he’s just not convinced it’s the defining threat from row two. His attention is on the silver cars in front.
“I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Mercedes get theirs competitive as well,” he added. “But until that time comes, we’ll try our best to take advantage of it.”
It’s a sharp line because it hints at two realities. First, that Mercedes — with Russell and Antonelli locking out the front row — have clearly found a way to put a lap together in Montreal. Second, that outright qualifying pace doesn’t automatically translate to the cleanest first 200 metres in this regulation set, where launches can still look ragged even from the best-prepared teams.
For Piastri, the job is to turn McLaren’s start consistency into position early, before the Sprint settles into the usual Montreal rhythm of tyre management, DRS trains and safety car roulette. If he and Norris can apply pressure immediately, they give themselves the chance to dictate the Sprint from the front rather than reacting to it — and, crucially, they can do it without the paranoia of checking for red cars filling the mirrors.
Ferrari will still fancy its chances of making noise — it’s been in the mix often enough this season, leading laps in all but the Miami Sprint — but the message from the McLaren garage is clear: they’re not treating the start as Ferrari’s party anymore. In 2026, even the smallest advantages are being policed, detected and, at times, engineered out. The teams that adapt quickest won’t just win arguments in the paddock — they’ll win positions off the line.
