Oscar Piastri wasn’t doing the hometown-hype thing on Thursday in Melbourne. If anything, he was trying to puncture it before it floats too far.
McLaren arrive to start 2026 carrying the baggage that comes with success: reigning constructors’ champions, and the team that delivered Lando Norris his first world title in 2025. Piastri, despite finishing third in that championship, still matched Norris on wins with seven. In most seasons, that combination would have you labelled the benchmark.
Piastri’s read is that this winter hasn’t offered McLaren that sort of comfort.
“Based off testing, we seem like we’re in the mix at the front,” he said. “I certainly wouldn’t be saying that we’re the favourite to be winning. I don’t think the picture looks quite as positive for us at the moment as it did 12 months ago…”
The interesting part wasn’t the modesty; it was the context. Piastri pointed straight at how violent the learning curve has been through pre-season running with the new MCL40, and how quickly the competitive picture can flip under the 2026 rules.
Even by modern F1 standards, he made it sound dramatic.
“The amount of performance we gained through six days of testing… if we had turned up here with the car we had at the first day of testing, we’d probably be in the midfield or at the back, to be honest.”
That’s the line that should make rival engineers sit up a little. Not because it’s a boast — he clearly didn’t mean it that way — but because it tells you what McLaren think the big game is right now: not peak pace in a single snapshot, but rate of improvement. Under a new regulation set, the teams that iterate cleanly, correlate quickly and bring understanding to the circuit before everyone else do the damage early. Titles get decided in those windows.
And Melbourne, Piastri stressed, is a reset compared to Bahrain or Barcelona: different layout demands, different compromises, and a different set of headaches for the power units. The tone was less “we’re sandbagging” and more “we haven’t really driven these cars properly yet”.
“Getting on top of things early is going to be important,” he said. “It’s going to look pretty different, how we have to drive the cars, from any other circuit we’ve been to.”
Piastri’s final summary was blunt: McLaren are in the conversation, but not at the top of it.
“We’re in the mix, but we need to find a bit more, I think.”
That aligns neatly with what McLaren’s senior management have been saying since Bahrain. Zak Brown’s message in Sakhir was that McLaren should be in the leading group, but not leading it — with Ferrari and Mercedes setting the standard out of the gate, and Red Bull’s true hand still not fully visible.
“I think we’ve produced a good car. I think we’ll be in the big four,” Brown said. “I don’t think we’re at the front of the big four… But I think the red guys and the silver guys are looking very strong. And I don’t think we’ve seen everything yet at Red Bull.”
Andrea Stella, too, has framed it similarly: Mercedes and Ferrari “a step ahead”, with McLaren and Red Bull close to each other.
There’s an unusual candour to all of this from the sport’s most successful team of the past 12 months. But it’s also a sensible bit of expectation management when you’re trying to thread a needle: keep pushing development like a challenger while carrying the scrutiny of a champion.
It also sets an intriguing psychological stage for the season-opener. Norris is the reigning world champion. Piastri is the home driver who ended last year with the same win tally and has never looked particularly interested in playing a long-term supporting role. If McLaren aren’t the class of the field right now, it subtly changes the internal maths: every point becomes more precious, and any early drop in form gets harder to mask with “we’ll bring upgrades”.
And if Piastri is right about just how much lap time is still sitting there to be found in these cars, the sharpest teams won’t necessarily be the ones who looked prettiest on the timing screens in February — they’ll be the ones who keep landing performance without tripping over themselves.
McLaren, historically, have made a habit in recent years of moving the needle during a season. The question in 2026 is whether that strength is enough to overcome starting a fraction behind. Melbourne will offer the first proper clue — not a final answer, but the start of one.
