Oscar Piastri doesn’t sound like a driver trying to talk up the opposition for effect. Ahead of Monaco, his read is simple: Ferrari tends to “click” around these streets, and McLaren is treating that as a very real warning shot.
It’s a notable shift in tone after a season that’s largely belonged to Mercedes. The Silver Arrows have won every grand prix so far in 2026, and even when McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari arrived in Miami with sizeable upgrade packages and managed to compress the gap, Mercedes answered back in Canada by rolling out an updated W17 and hoovering up the weekend’s crucial P1s.
McLaren left Montreal feeling it had more in hand than the results suggested. Lando Norris and Piastri qualified third and fourth but did so on the wrong tyre for the conditions — intermediates on a drying track — and paid for it almost immediately with an early switch. From there the race had a slightly inevitable shape: Lewis Hamilton and Kimi Antonelli on the podium behind the winner, with Max Verstappen salvaging third for Red Bull.
Monaco, though, is where the usual logic gets thrown into the harbour. The margins on outright pace still matter, but the way you access that pace — and the consequences of nailing it at the right moment — matter more. Piastri’s point is that Ferrari’s package, quirks and all, has historically found a sweet spot in Monte Carlo.
“I’m expecting Ferrari to be quick in Monaco,” Piastri said. “I mean, they click there every year — somehow.
“I think this year, with the kind of characteristics they have, looking very good in the corners, and maybe struggling a bit more on the straights, I think Monaco is going to be a good track for them.
“So let’s see, hopefully it could be a good one for us as well.”
There’s no mystery why McLaren’s drivers are circling Ferrari as the potential pole team. Monaco amplifies what the cars do well at low speed, over kerbs, under traction, and through the kind of corner sequences that punish any reluctance to rotate. Ferrari, by general consensus up and down the pitlane, has looked strongest where the lap is built on chassis performance and commitment rather than straight-line efficiency.
Andrea Stella didn’t try to soften that assessment, either. McLaren’s team principal pointed to the team’s own analysis — the unglamorous, cold reality of GPS overlays — and it paints a familiar picture: Ferrari sharp in the corners, particularly early in the lap, and less potent on the straights. Monaco, of course, is not a place that’s going to make you pay much for being a touch softer in a drag race.
“When we look at the overlay based on the GPS speed, we can see that Ferrari is definitely a competitive chassis in the corners,” Stella said. “Like the first sector, they’ve been always very competitive.
“Normally these features they tend to reward on a track like Monaco. In addition to that, we see, for instance, in Canada, the Ferrari loses time in the straights, but you don’t have much of that in Monaco.”
That’s the strategic sting in the tail for everyone else. If Ferrari does deliver on its Monaco trend and sticks a car on pole, the race can become less about raw speed and more about position management — the slow, suffocating kind. And in 2026, there’s another layer: Ferrari’s SF-26 has been characterised as strong off the line, a useful trait anywhere, but especially on a circuit where the first metres after the lights can decide whether your afternoon is spent controlling or chasing.
McLaren isn’t exactly weak in that department, but the bigger point is that Monaco can turn a small qualifying advantage into a vice-like grip on the whole event. Get to the front, dictate the pace, force everyone else to take risks that the layout simply doesn’t reward. That’s why Stella says his drivers are “pretty right” to view Ferrari as “possibly the favourite car for a pole position”.
For Charles Leclerc, that conversation carries an extra edge. Ferrari’s recent Monaco form has been strong, and Leclerc’s own one-lap record here is hard to ignore: pole in three of the last five runnings. If the car genuinely comes alive again over the bumps and through the slow stuff, it’s difficult to imagine Ferrari not being in the mix when it counts — and in Monaco, “when it counts” is Saturday, not Sunday.
Mercedes will still arrive as the season’s benchmark, and it would be reckless to assume the W17 suddenly stops working because the barriers are closer. But there’s a different kind of pressure here: not the pressure of having the quickest car across a stint, but the pressure of having to be perfect in a window that can vanish with one yellow flag.
Piastri’s warning, then, is less a prediction than a reminder of how Monaco punishes complacency. Ferrari may not have looked like the most complete car everywhere else, but this is the one weekend where their strengths could be enough to flip the script — and where everyone else might only get one clean shot at stopping them.
