Oscar Piastri isn’t buying the idea that McLaren are about to be outgunned in 2026 simply because they’re not the ones building the power unit.
With Formula 1’s new rules now properly in motion — fresh chassis concepts, active aerodynamics and a reworked engine formula — the paddock has been quick to circle back to an old assumption: works teams start with an edge because they can shape the car around the power unit from the earliest stages. On paper, that’s a neat argument. In practice, Piastri thinks it’s being overplayed, even with Mercedes widely talked up as the pre-season benchmark.
McLaren arrive at this reset as the reigning champions in both championships, but the early noise has centred on Mercedes’ readiness. Piastri’s take is that the advantage of being a manufacturer outfit exists, sure — but it’s hardly a decisive trump card when you’ve got a supplier relationship as tight as McLaren’s is with Mercedes High Performance Powertrains.
“Being a works team obviously has its advantages, especially now given that there is development again on the engine side of things,” Piastri said during the Barcelona shakedown. “We’ve obviously got a very close relationship with Mercedes HPP, which is very beneficial to us.”
That closeness matters more than the label on the garage door. McLaren have been back on Mercedes power since 2021, and Piastri’s point is that the operational reality — the day-to-day integration work, the shared problem-solving, the feedback loops — can narrow the gap that people assume must exist between a customer and a works squad.
More telling, in his view, is what McLaren’s early running didn’t reveal. The “teething problems” that cropped up during the Barcelona shakedown weren’t, he insisted, the kind you’d pin on being a customer team arriving late to the party.
“All our teething problems we had in the test were not to do with not being a works team,” he said. “So I don’t think there’s necessarily a disadvantage.”
Piastri did concede there’s a logical case for Mercedes having a slightly cleaner run into these regulations — not because McLaren are asleep at the wheel, but because the manufacturer has had the luxury of aligning its interpretation of the rules internally for longer. Engine manufacturers have been working on their 2026 projects well before the chassis design window officially opened on 1 January 2025, which inevitably helps them map out packaging and system integration earlier.
But he pushed back on the notion that this automatically turns into laptime. McLaren, he argues, have been deep in the same integration process for a long time already, and the deciding factor is more likely to be execution than status.
“We may be a little bit behind, that they’ve had years to kind of really integrate these rules to their car, but we’ve been in that process for a long time as well,” Piastri said. “So I don’t think it’s necessarily a disadvantage.”
If anything, the first proper clue from Barcelona wasn’t a mystical “works advantage” — it was simply how efficiently Mercedes operated across the shakedown. Piastri sounded more impressed by the sheer completeness of their programme than any headline pace.
“It’s more going to be about who was able to capitalise in the last 12 months on the aero testing and just getting things organised,” he said. “That’s what was very impressive about Mercedes in particular is how they hit the ground running and were able to do 150-plus laps every day, which is probably the most impressive thing so far.”
The lap counts backed that up. Unofficially, Mercedes logged 500 laps in Barcelona, while McLaren recorded 291. That kind of mileage doesn’t win races in March by itself, but it does speak to how quickly a team has got on top of systems, procedures and reliability — the unglamorous stuff that can decide whether you start the season chasing your tail or refining performance.
The times, such as they are at this stage, offered a little more intrigue. George Russell ended up second-fastest in the Mercedes W17, a tenth off Lewis Hamilton. Lando Norris slotted in third for McLaren, another 0.15s behind Russell. Nobody in the paddock is naïve enough to take those numbers as a form guide, but combined with the lap count they do reinforce the sense that Mercedes have rolled out a car that’s immediately usable.
McLaren’s perspective, though, is that the season won’t be won on day one of running in Spain — and certainly not on the basis of whether the engine comes from the next building over. The sharper question is whether you’ve spent the last year making the right aerodynamic calls, understanding the new tools, and getting a fundamentally robust package to the track.
Next comes the first official chance to read the room properly. Teams reconvene in Bahrain on Wednesday for the three-day pre-season test, where the programmes get longer, the operating windows widen and the political games begin in earnest.
The 2026 season starts on 6 March with first practice for the Australian Grand Prix. By then, the “works team advantage” theory will either have turned into something tangible — or it’ll have been replaced by the usual truth of a new era: the teams that look calm early are often the ones who’ve simply made fewer wrong turns when nobody was watching.
