McLaren arrived in 2026 carrying the kind of status that changes the way every Sunday is judged. Back-to-back Constructors’ champions, Lando Norris wearing the number one as the reigning Drivers’ champion, and a winter spent talking like a team that had learned how to win the hard way.
Ten races in, it’s been the opposite: not a slow bleed, but a series of self-inflicted cuts. The latest sting came in Canada, where McLaren left itself regretting an intermediate-tyre call in a race that also featured the sort of messy, multi-factor weekend that top teams usually manage to avoid. Team principal Andrea Stella didn’t try to dress it up. The start to the season, he admitted, has been “definitely below” what McLaren expected.
And the painful bit for McLaren isn’t just that it’s behind — it’s how it’s fallen behind. Oscar Piastri didn’t even make the start in Australia after trouble on the laps to the grid. In China, neither McLaren got away from the line thanks to an electrical problem on the power unit. Canada then stacked issues across the spectrum: sporting execution, reliability and an accident. Put it together and you have five results from the first 10 grands prix that ended either outside the points or without seeing the chequered flag.
That kind of hit-rate would be worrying for anyone. For a team trying to defend titles, it’s a slow-motion gift to its rivals.
The points picture makes grim reading. Norris is already 73 points behind championship leader Kimi Antonelli, with Piastri another 10 adrift beyond that. In a season where momentum can swing quickly, that gap is still recoverable on paper — but only if the errors stop. McLaren can’t keep giving away weekends and hope to “develop” its way back into the fight. The modern points system isn’t kind to intermittent excellence.
Yet there’s a reason Stella is choosing his words carefully rather than waving the white flag. McLaren is still third in the Constructors’ standings and has collected three podiums in among the wreckage. That tells you the underlying car is capable of doing the job when the weekend is clean. It also tells you what’s been most frustrating inside the team: this isn’t a case of being outgunned across the board. It’s a case of not cashing in when the opportunity is there.
Stella pointed to “encouraging indication” in the car’s development and what McLaren is learning about exploiting its power unit — the kind of phrasing that hints at performance still being unlocked, not merely bolted on. The subtext is familiar up and down the pitlane: the raw speed doesn’t matter if your operational floor collapses every other Sunday.
“We have had issues of a different kind,” Stella said, running through the sequence from Piastri’s pre-start problem in Australia to the “painful” electrical failure in China and then the scattergun nature of Canada. “There’s definitely lots to take away and review.”
It’s also a reminder that McLaren’s problems haven’t been confined to one department, which is usually the most uncomfortable diagnosis for a team principal. If it’s just tyre usage, you can fix process and modelling. If it’s a single reliability weakness, you isolate it and move on. When the list includes the pre-race procedure, power unit systems, race-day calls and incident management, you’re talking about a broader tightening-up — not a one-off patch.
Still, Stella’s message wasn’t defensive. It was defiant in a very McLaren way: focusing on the next step, not the last mistake. He stressed that the season is only five races old in the context of a calendar that’s expected to run to at least 22 grands prix, with some uncertainty around whether the Middle East events will be recovered. Either way, the point stands: there’s a lot of season left, and a lot of points.
“We don’t think very much of what’s been, we just try to learn every day,” Stella said. “We are definitely believers that the championship is not signed off. We want the championship to be decided in Abu Dhabi.”
Belief is the easy part. Execution is where this season has unravelled. McLaren has already seen how quickly a title defence can turn into a scramble when the opposition simply keeps scoring. Norris and Piastri don’t need miracles; they need ordinary weekends — clean starts, straightforward strategy calls, and a car that reaches the flag. Do that for a run of races and the maths starts to look less hopeless.
The timing of all this adds an interesting edge to Monaco, where McLaren will mark its 1000th race start in Formula 1. The team is inviting every living McLaren grand prix winner onto the grid on Thursday, with the current challenger set to sit alongside the M2B — a reminder of the long arc of the organisation, from its earliest days to its modern peak.
Anniversary celebrations can be warm, even sentimental. But inside the garage, this one will land differently. McLaren doesn’t need a reminder of what it’s been. It needs evidence of what it still is: a team capable of turning a messy start into a serious title fight, and doing it before the season gets away completely.
