Around 12 months ago, Lando Norris dominated the streets of Monte Carlo.

Some 12 months later, however, and he was crawling along them back to pit lane to retire with his second engine problem of the weekend, putting a miserable punctuation point on a dire round for McLaren.

Norris and teammate Oscar Piastri had qualified eighth and seventh respectively, neither within half a second pole.

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“Reality check” is how Norris described that miserable qualifying result, but by Sunday he sounded more resigned.

“That’s life sometimes,” he said, lamenting that his team’s hard work behind the scenes to get into shape in 2026 wasn’t being rewarded.

Piastri’s fourth place — thanks to attrition rather than car pace — was a faint bright for the reigning constructors champion, but even the Australian was clear-eyed about the result.

“We obviously need to find some pace for next week,” he said.

It was in Miami, only two rounds ago, that McLaren had seemed to have turned a corner, but its one-two finish in the sprint and double grand prix podium feels like a totally different season after two dispiriting results in Canada and Monaco.

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Is it as bad as it looks, or can McLaren’s increasingly distant third place in the standings be explained away?

With its frontrunning rivals on the move, it’s running out of time define the answers to those questions itself.

‘Engine sounded really awful’ Verstappen | 02:04

‘REALITY CHECK’

After dominating last year’s title race, McLaren sits third in the championship standings, 126 behind the rampant Mercedes and 47 points adrift of Ferrari.

Though on average it’s been the second quickest car over one lap so far this season, the battle with Ferrari is close, and Red Bull Racing is a closing in as a threat.

Average gap to fastest

1. Mercedes: fastest

1. McLaren: +0.439 seconds

3. Ferrari: +0.473 seconds

4. Red Bull Racing: +0.667 seconds

But Monaco was a blowout. It’s not simply that McLaren never really looked in the mix; it’s that every other frontrunning team had a shot at pole while the papaya cars languished down the order, unable to fire a shot.

Gap to fastest, Monaco

1. Mercedes: fastest

2. Red Bull Racing: +0.043 seconds

3. Ferrari: +0.228 seconds

4. McLaren: +0.573 seconds

This is the reality check Norris was pointing to.

It was a particularly painful result coming off the back of an uncompetitive Canadian Grand Prix, which was spoiled not only by the team’s disastrous decision to start the dry race on wet tyres but also by diabolical race pace.

Piastri, McLaren’s only finisher in Montreal, was on average 1.9 seconds off Mercedes’s pace, by far the team’s worst Sunday performance of the season before Monte Carlo.

“There’s certainly an important reality check that comes from Canada and Monaco, and the reality check is, first of all, looking at the facts,” team principal Andrea Stella said, per Racer.

“We have not been fast enough, I would say especially in terms of race pace, in both Canada and here, and we have not been reliable enough.”

But to write off McLaren as having turned up with an unreliable and uncompetitive car would be a misleadingly simple explanation.

Leclerc goes SCORCHED EARTH on his car | 02:49

THE RELIABILITY QUESTION

Reliability was one of the big preseason questions for 2026 given rule changes for both chassis and engine, and though there’s been no widespread chronic failures this year, unreliability has certainly played a role for some teams than for others.

McLaren is feeling the brunt of it. From 12 grand prix entries across six rounds, McLaren has only nine starts and seven finishes, one of which was out of the points.

“When we look at reliability, we have had issues pretty much in all areas of the car,” Stella admitted. “It’s not like it’s a specific area.

“[In Monaco] it was power unit. We have had other issues with power unit — I would say this has probably been the most important area for reliability — but for Lando in Canada it was the gearbox.

“There’s a performance assessment, and there is a reliability assessment that we are doing, looking at Canada and looking at Monaco. We understand these reliability issues in isolation. We can fix them, but obviously, when you have so many issues, it may be symptomatic of the fact that the project is still relatively young.”

Stella treaded carefully with his answers. Once already this season — after McLaren’s double DNS in China — McLaren has pointed to issues on the Mercedes side being to blame.

But there was no escaping that Norris suffered two Mercedes engine problems in Monte Carlo alone — in FP2 and then in the race — and Stella said it was a clear sign of McLaren’s disadvantage as an engine customer rather than being a works team building its own power units.

“Never before have we felt that being a customer team has put us on the back foot, and when I say this — and I want to be clear here to avoid any misunderstanding — it’s not because you are a lower priority for [Mercedes],” he said.

“It’s because you have less opportunities to integrate, to stay on the same timeline when it comes to addressing reliability problems or exploitation of the power unit from a performance point of view, combining the efforts when you use the facilities, and some experiments on the chassis side that you can add to a long run of the power unit when you are a works team.

“There are many reasons why reliability [is] associated to the power unit, or taking advantage of being a works team from a power unit point of view.

“I think these reliability issues have made it into 2026, where we have had such a large technical regulation change.”

Monaco track starts to break apart?! | 03:31

WHAT ABOUT A WORKS ENGINE?

Though McLaren has enjoyed de facto works status in the past — notably with Mercedes between 1995 and 2009 — it has never constructed its own engine.

McLaren CEO Zak Brown has suggested he isn’t closed to the idea of following Red Bull in setting up its own engine factory for a future regulation change, but he said that it isn’t in the team’s immediate future.

“Anytime a new regulation comes out, we’ll take a look and see, is it something technically that’s interesting? Is it something fiscally that makes sense?” he said, per The Race. “We’ll go through that process when that happens.

“But I think sitting here right now, we’re extremely happy with Mercedes and we anticipate continuing with them.”

But being a customer team doesn’t mean being doomed to failure. McLaren already proved this in 2024 and 2025, winning two constructors titles and a drivers championship with Mercedes engines.

But that was at the end of a 12-year engine formula, when performance differences were limited and all power units were being fully exploited.

The job is harder in the first year of new rules, when engine development is ongoing and, particularly with these hybrid units, execution is still a significant question race to race.

Stella said McLaren was having to learn new ways of working with Mercedes to get the most from the relationship.

“That great relationship [with Mercedes] allows us to review item by item, learn from each item and solve it technically, but when you don’t know what’s coming, it’s not sufficient to simply address item by item,” he said, per Autosport.

“You ultimately need to review the depth, the intensity and the effectiveness of the [relationship].

“But it’s also a wider review in terms of: what do we have to enhance? Because in 2026 there’s so much novelty, there’s so many new things, and we kind of have to operate at a new level of collaboration compared to what we were doing before.”

‘Something is going to explode!’ | 00:55

THE PERFORMANCE QUESTION

Unreliability isn’t masking great performance, however. McLaren’s lack of form in Monaco was genuine.

Calling it a trend, however, is an exaggeration.

McLaren’s season has been much worse than hoped for but also not nearly as bad as it looks.

It was only two races ago that the team looked like a genuine victory contender in Miami. That was with fundamentally the same car that was running subsequently in Canada and Monaco.

Though the team lacked race pace in Canada, over a single lap it was competitive, perhaps even surprisingly so.

Taking each team’s best qualifying time from the sprint and the grand prix shows little between McLaren and Mercedes.

Gap to fastest, Canada

1. Mercedes: fastest

2. McLaren: +0.151 seconds

3. Ferrari: +0.290 seconds

4. Red Bull Racing: +0.329 seconds

In the context of Canada being a historically good Mercedes circuit, that’s significant.

Despite Montreal and Monte Carlo being diametrically opposed in terms of layout, there are similarities between them that explain why McLaren was uncompetitive at both.

“It’s very clear that we don’t have enough grip, mainly because we don’t have enough aerodynamic load,” Stella said, per Racer.

“It’s also clear that we are not getting the tyres to operate in the window in which they perform at the best, especially in circuits like [Monaco] and Canada, where the tarmac is extremely smooth, and the tyres operate in a particular regime — and this year the tyres are relatively stiff, and they need the temperature to operate well.”

Race day in Canada was extremely cold, at around 13°C ambient. For a car like McLaren’s, which is gentle on its tyres, it was disastrous.

Monaco was much warmer, but as the slowest circuit on the calendar, it’s extremely low energy. Here McLaren’s lack of downforce bit hard in terms of both general performance and also getting heat into the tyres.

Brundle’s awkward Kardashian grid moment | 00:34

WHAT ABOUT THIS WEEKEND?

The lack of downforce is a clear weakness, and it’s one Stella has been open about for much of the season, with a big push needed to add aerodynamic load to the car.

But being gentle on tyres doesn’t have to be the same sort of chink in the armour.

Think, for example, of sizzling Miami, where the McLaren car excelled thanks in part to its ability to circulate without overheating the tyres.

Think ahead now to this weekend’s Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix, where Formula 1 is forecasting a top of 34°C on race day.

The Spanish circuit is more aerodynamically challenging, which will still put McLaren on the back foot if it can’t bring upgrades to the car — it’s still yet to race with the new front wing it brought to Miami but took off after practice — but the return to a more conventional circuit should see the team back in the mix among the frontrunners rather than hanging back.

Stella, for one, remains optimistic, noting that the team had come from a long way back in 2024 to win the constructors championship.

“We remain, obviously, with the mindset that this could be another 2024 in terms of catching up at the end,” he said.

But in 2024 its title deficit peaked at 115 points after six rounds. This year, after the same number of rounds, the deficit is already out to 126 points.

It also had the advantage of battling a Red Bull Racing team on the precipice of decline and with one driver — Sergio Pérez — not pulling his weight. Mercedes seems unlikely to put itself in that same position this year.

“In 2024 our trajectory from reliability and performance was more convincing,” Stella acknowledged. “So if we want to stay in the championship, we need to have a turnaround.”

Left unsaid is that McLaren needs to turnaround fast.

Mercedes is generating its own momentum, while both Ferrari and Red Bull Racing are threatening to take big steps forward.

If there are still signs of life in McLaren’s championship defence, it’s running out of time to show them.