McLaren offers frank summary of F1 2026 performance with 0.5-1s gap to Mercedes

McLaren boss Andrea Stella admitted that it’ll take time to catch Mercedes in the 2026 Formula 1 campaign with the gap up to “one second” per lap after the Australian Grand Prix.

George Russell led a Silver Arrows 1-2 in the Melbourne season opener after beating team-mate Kimi Antonelli to pole, while being at least 0.7s ahead of the other 10 squads.

Mercedes therefore backed up the favourites tag it gained during testing, though Ferrari did do its best to challenge on Sunday with Charles Leclerc at one stage fighting Russell for the lead.

The Scuderia ultimately finished third and fourth, but 35.5s behind in fifth was McLaren’s Lando Norris, whose team-mate Oscar Piastri crashed out on the reconnaissance lap.

Such a big gap is a cause for concern for the reigning champions, especially when it also uses a Mercedes engine, though ahead of Melbourne Stella did predict a tough start to 2026.

“The gap today was, if anything, similar to what we saw yesterday in qualifying,” said Stella, as Piastri and Norris respectively qualified fifth and sixth with a 0.862s and 0.957s gap to Russell.

Andrea Stella, McLaren

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Formula 1 via Getty Images

“There’s performance that needs to come from two main areas: one is the power unit exploitation and one is having more grip in the corners.

“Still, we remain a little puzzled by the difference we see in the data between the speed of our car and the speed of other cars using the same power unit. It clearly indicates that we should be doing a better job in understanding how to utilise the power unit with the complexities that came with the 2026 regulations.

“So, definitely work to do and at the same time, when we look at the GPS overlays, we see that Mercedes is faster in some of the corners. Therefore, like I said, we have clear objectives and priorities.

“We need to find a way to extract more out of the power unit and on the other side, develop the car. This will take a few races in terms of seeing some major upgrades.

“Therefore, I think in these few initial races, we will have to make sure that we extract most of the car in its current configuration. But definitely work ahead of us and the gap at the moment seems to be in the range between half a second and one second.”

His thoughts were echoed by 2025 world champion Norris, who thwarted late pressure from Red Bull’s Max Verstappen with those two teams seemingly in a battle for third in the pecking order.

Lando Norris, McLaren

Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images

“Just on pure pace, were we 50 seconds behind? No,” said Norris. “If I had a clean race like George and didn’t have to battle as much, that would be a better look for us, but we had to.

“So, I don’t think it’s dreadful, but we killed the tyres after three laps. We have our front graining issues like we always have and that’s not changed from one car to the next.

“We have a lot to try and figure out. The good thing is we have a big gap to the cars behind – similar issue to Red Bull – the bad thing is we have a big gap to the cars ahead.

“Today was, I think, more of an understanding that we’re nowhere near where we need to be with the car and we’ve got to improve that.”

Additional reporting by Ronald Vording

Photos from Australian GP – Sunday