McLaren’s second Bahrain test began the way most useful tests do: quietly, methodically, and with the sort of lap-count discipline that tells you the team’s chasing answers rather than headlines.
Across the day Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri combined for 124 laps, Norris banking 54 in the morning before handing the car to Piastri for a 70-lap afternoon. If you’re looking for a single snapshot of where the MCL40 stands in 2026, you won’t get it from a timing screen in February — but you can learn plenty from what a team chooses to run, and when.
McLaren’s programme leaned heavily into aero and tyre correlation. Norris cycled through different power unit modes and worked across Pirelli’s C1, C2 and C3 compounds, the kind of spread you use when you’re building a baseline and checking that what you think you’ve brought to the track is actually what the car is doing. Piastri’s stint followed a familiar pattern: some initial laps carrying aerodynamic rakes to harvest data, then a switch into the C4 tyre to start nudging closer to performance-oriented running.
The lap time that will do the rounds is Piastri’s 1:33.469s, which left him second on the day and just 0.01s shy of George Russell. It’s the sort of margin that reads like a statement and behaves like a mirage; in testing, a hundredth can be a genuine tenth in disguise, or nothing at all. Still, it’s a tidy indicator that when McLaren trimmed the car up, it didn’t fall over.
Piastri, for his part, sounded more interested in the feel than the flourish. “Overall, it has been a productive day,” he said. “My running in the afternoon felt solid and we made good progress.” He also pointed to the shifting Bahrain conditions — warmer temperatures in his session and different winds compared to what the team saw last week — as a useful variable rather than an inconvenience. In other words: more pages in the notebook.
That theme ran through McLaren technical director of performance Mark Temple’s debrief. He referenced the way the temperature rose into the afternoon and how the wind made the car more sensitive from corner to corner during Norris’s morning run. “The variety of long and short runs and working through different tyres and power unit modes has given us more important data to work with as we look to unlock further gains across the remainder of the week,” Temple said.
It’s worth underlining what that language usually means at this stage. Week one in Bahrain is typically about validation and reliability — confirming systems, checking new parts don’t introduce weird behaviours, making sure the car can do a full day without the garage becoming a pit of panic. By the opening day of week two, the tone shifts: fewer “does it work?” questions, more “how much is in it?” conversations. That doesn’t automatically translate into glory runs, but it does mean teams begin to push the car through setup sweeps that actually matter and tyre work that’s less about surviving and more about extracting.
McLaren’s approach looks consistent with a squad that believes it belongs in the leading group, but doesn’t yet know exactly where the borders are. The paddock expectation remains that the familiar four — McLaren, Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull — are setting the pace, with Mercedes spoken of as early favourites. Even so, the sport’s newest habit is to turn pre-season form into overconfident prophecy, and Bahrain is the easiest place to get caught out. Fuel loads, engine modes and run plans are the invisible hands moving the stopwatch.
Piastri admitted as much at the end of last week’s running. Asked where McLaren stood, he was blunt: “Where we are in the pecking order? I don’t know.” He did add that it “kind of looks like the top four teams are still the top four teams”, but the uncertainty was the point. Testing tells you what your car is; it rarely tells you what everyone else’s is.
The more interesting McLaren subplot, though, is how cleanly the team’s work is being split. Norris doing the morning systems and tyre range, Piastri stepping into aero instrumentation and then moving onto a softer compound — it’s sensible, but also revealing. McLaren is trying to build a car that behaves across conditions, not one that’s engineered to light up a single lap at the expense of everything else. That’s the difference between arriving in Melbourne with a fast car and arriving with a fast car you understand.
Over the next two days, that understanding will be tested — not by the temptation to chase P1 on the timesheets, but by whether McLaren can convert these “higher-value” runs into a setup window that survives Bahrain’s winds and temperature swings. The truth, as ever, won’t really arrive until qualifying for the Australian Grand Prix early next month, when the fuel burns off, the engine modes come out to play, and nobody can hide behind a data-gathering alibi.
For now, McLaren has done what it needed to do: it ran, it learned, and it left Bahrain looking like it belongs at the sharp end — even if it’s still too early to say precisely how sharp that end is.
