Oscar Piastri walked out of Bahrain testing sounding like a driver who’s seen enough to be encouraged — but not enough to start making bold predictions.
McLaren left the desert with the fattest data haul of anyone, logging 817 laps across the two official pre-season tests as it worked through its programme with the MCL40. Mileage doesn’t automatically translate into Melbourne performance, but in the first winter of a new rules cycle it does buy you something valuable: fewer unknowns when the lights go out for real.
Piastri’s read on it was pretty straightforward. The car has behaved, the team’s hit its running plan, and the direction looks clearer than it did on day one. That alone can be a quiet win in a year when plenty of teams will arrive at round one still arguing with their own correlation.
“I think we’re probably getting a little bit more optimistic,” Piastri said after his final outings in Bahrain. “I mean, the testing has gone smoothly for us, at least. Been able to get a lot of laps in, learned a lot of things, both good and bad. I think we’ve got some good ideas and good directions.
“You’re going to try a lot of bad things alongside the good things, and I think finding out anything you can before round one is always important, so I feel like we’re making good progress.
“I wouldn’t say we’re leading the pack by any stretch of the imagination, but feel like we’re not too bad.”
That last line is doing the heavy lifting — and it matches the internal tone McLaren has been setting publicly. The team comes into 2026 as the reigning Constructors’ champion for a second straight season, with Lando Norris having delivered McLaren’s first Drivers’ title since 2008. But the message from the top has been notably conservative for a squad that spent much of 2025 setting the pace: expect to be in the mix, don’t expect to roll into Australia as the obvious favourite.
Both Zak Brown and Andrea Stella have already pointed to Mercedes and Ferrari as the likely early benchmarks, with the caveat everyone in the paddock is making right now — the development curve in 2026 is going to be savage. If your platform is decent, you can jump forward quickly. If it isn’t, you can spend half a season chasing your own tail while the frontrunners disappear.
From Piastri’s perspective, what matters is that McLaren’s winter didn’t feel like damage limitation. Testing, he suggested, was used properly: not just to bank laps, but to explore the edges of the setup window and deliberately try things that might fail. That’s how you learn what your car is — and, just as importantly, what it isn’t — before you’re making those calls under parc fermé pressure.
There’s also an unmistakable subtext here about expectations at Albert Park. This is the race that always carries extra noise for Piastri, and not just because it’s home. McLaren arrives as champion, Norris arrives as the man everyone’s measuring themselves against, and Piastri arrives as the local who knows exactly what a good weekend in Melbourne can do for momentum. The temptation would be to sell a fairy-tale opening chapter.
Instead, Piastri’s keeping it grounded: close enough to fight if things break his way, not yet convinced the outright package will carry them to the front on merit alone.
And that, frankly, is the sensible posture. Testing gives you tendencies — not truths. Bahrain’s conditions, fuel loads and run plans always obscure the final picture, and 2026’s new era only magnifies that uncertainty. McLaren’s 817 laps say it has a solid baseline and a lot of answers in its notebook. They don’t say the champions are automatically the quickest.
The Australian Grand Prix — Piastri’s hometown weekend — runs from 6-8 March at Albert Park. That’s when the paddock stops guessing and starts dealing in lap time. For now, McLaren’s message is simple: the winter’s been productive, the mood’s improved, and the optimism is real — just carefully rationed.
