This weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix will decide whether McLaren has any hope at all of defending its constructors championship.

The 2026 season has been the campaign McLaren had hoped it wouldn’t have to have. Having won two successive constructors titles in 2024–25, it should’ve been enjoying the peak of a championship-winning dynasty; instead this year’s rule changes have wiped out its advantage and left it well off the pace.

Team principal Andrea Stella has been forced to admit that the team pursued some design concepts it now knows were wrong, and it’s spent months changing course. With no major upgrades in that time, it’s fallen behind all its rival frontrunning teams and has dropped to an unlikely 163 points behind Mercedes.

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But the pain was suffered for the gain of this weekend, when the team will unleash that changed direction in the first stage of a major upgrade package.

“My ideal trajectory at the moment is that we would like to close the gap with the next round of upgrades that will happen across the shutdown, with something happening before and something happening after the shutdown,” McLaren boss Andrea Stella said.

“Hopefully by then the others have not disappeared too far in front in the championship.”

On paper it’s a long shot.

But McLaren has come from a long way back and won the title before — just two years ago in fact.

Piastri responds to rumours | 01:14

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2024?

McLaren’s breakthrough 2024 championship is one no-one really saw coming.

The team was thought to still be in a rebuilding phase. It had made significant strides in 2023, rising from the back of the grid to regular podium contention, but the hierarchy made clear it was still waiting on major infrastructure upgrades to come on tap before it could really move forward— and much of that work was targeting a return to title contention in 2026 with the change in regulations.

The team talked down its early 2024 potential after pre-season testing but promised, much like 2023, there was goodness in the development pipeline waiting to be unleashed.

That pipeline delivered at the Miami Grand Prix, the sixth round of the season, where a massive suite of developments propelled Lando Norris to the first victory of his career.

Even then, though, we weren’t to know that McLaren was set on a championship-winning trajectory.

The team had been handily beaten all season up to then. It had just two podiums to show for the opening five rounds and had rapidly lost pace with a Red Bull Racing outfit that looked like it was kicking on from its record-breaking domination of 2023.

McLaren started the Miami Grand Prix 99 points adrift of the title lead, and owing to the sprint and Oscar Piastri’s non-scoring grand prix, the deficit widened to 115 points despite Norris’s victory, the first for any McLaren driver since Daniel Ricciardo’s 2021 Monza miracle.

But the Miami upgrade was followed by several more rounds of super-effective updates that inexorably raised McLaren level with and then ahead of Red Bull Racing, which was labouring under the weight of a dead-end car philosophy and a second driver incapable of scoring.

McLaren overhauled the incumbent long before the end of the season — so long in fact that Ferrari became its closest challenger, running the fight for the constructors title to Abu Dhabi.

McLaren doubled its success last year, winning both titles, but this year’s regulation shake-up has erased its advantage.

Having climbed the mountain once, McLaren is now hoping it can repeat history.

Gasly suffers wild crash in Belgium | 00:27

MORE SIMILAR TO 2024 THAN YOU THINK

Things may feel hopeless for McLaren now, but there are some fascinating similarities between its pre-Miami position in 2024 and its standing in this year’s championship.

Let’s take a look at the pace standings in the opening stages of 2024. All times are based on normalised 80-second laps to compare different circuits more accurately.

2024: average gap to fastest before Miami

1. Red Bull Racing: +0.003 seconds

2. Ferrari: +0.305 seconds

3. McLaren: +0.405 seconds

4. Mercedes: +0.602 seconds.

Red Bull Racing was way ahead of the rest — its title double in 2023 was the most dominant in Formula 1 history — and it looked certain to keep things rolling in 2024.

It’s a surprisingly similar spread to what we have today.

2026: average gap to fastest, year to date

1. Mercedes: fastest

2. Ferrari: +0.367 seconds

3. McLaren: +0.433 seconds

4. Red Bull Racing: +0.532 seconds

The name of the leading team is different, but McLaren is starting almost exactly as far back this year as it was in 2024.

For reference, let’s take a look at where the competitive order ended up from Miami onwards in 2024.

2024: average gap to fastest from Miami onwards

1. McLaren: +0.166 seconds

2. Red Bull Racing: +0.199 seconds

3. Ferrari: +0.330 seconds

4. Mercedes: +0.385 seconds

McLaren moved definitively into top spot, though not with the kind of domination that Red Bull Racing enjoyed in the early phase of the season. RBR also wasn’t completely obliterated; it remained roughly in the mix at many races.

But there is a final important metric that tells us a lot about how McLaren overhauled Red Bull Racing so suddenly and unexpectedly.

2024: development trajectory

1. McLaren: improved by 0.012 seconds per race

2. Mercedes: improved by 0.012 seconds per race

3. Ferrari: improved by 0.004 seconds per race

4. Red Bull Racing: degraded by 0.015 seconds per race

This development metric draws a line through each team’s average single-lap deficit to try to measure the efficacy of their upgrades. The numbers from 2024 demonstrate not just that McLaren improved rapidly but also that Red Bull Racing slid back with alarming speed.

That’s a critical second part of the story.

Hamilton smashes the wall in P3! | 01:08

McLAREN CAPITALISED ON RED BULL RACING’S DECLINE

McLaren was clearly a team on the rise, and it started winning in 2024 while Red Bull Racing was still performing at a high level.

But its shift to the top of the table was accelerated by Red Bull Racing’s remarkable demise.

RBR had totally demolished the competition in 2023, winning every race but one to set new records for domination. It had also secured its first-ever one-two finish in the drivers championship, with Verstappen romping to his third title leagues ahead of teammate Sergio Pérez.

Things couldn’t have got any better, but they weren’t expected to get so much worse.

We now know that the team was falling apart from the inside.

A remarkable brain drain was beginning, with the team haemorrhaging some of its longest serving, best known and most skilled personnel.

Adrian Newey, the legendary technical chief, filed his resignation around the time of the 2024 Miami Grand Prix — a devastating blow that in retrospect has become symbolic of the team’s demise.

The development path Red Bull Racing had chosen — and that Newey had reportedly argued against, only to find his design office wasn’t for turning — led it down a dead-end that turned what had been the greatest car ever built into a twitchy beast that even Verstappen struggled to tame.

But it was Pérez who bore the brunt of the car’s difficult characteristics — and his preference for more docile cars had already had him on the ropes against Verstappen.

The season started well enough — they usually did for Pérez.

2024: average score per event before Miami

1. Red Bull Racing: 39.0 points per round (Verstappen: 22.0 ppr, Pérez: 17.0 ppr)

2. Ferrari: 30.2 points per round

3. McLaren: 19.2 points per round (Norris: 11.6 ppr, Piastri: 7.6 ppr)

4. Mercedes: 10.4 points per round

But after Miami, Pérez’s score rate fell off a cliff, taking the team’s score rate with it.

2024: average score per event from Miami onwards

1. McLaren: 30.0 points per round (Norris: 16.6 ppr, Piastri: 13.4 ppr)

2. Ferrari: 26.4 points per round

3. Mercedes: 21.9 points per round

4. Red Bull Racing: 20.7 points per round (Verstappen: 17.2 ppr, Pérez: 3.5 ppr)

McLaren’s improved form benefited Norris and Piastri roughly equally, whereas Red Bull Racing’s decline was borne almost entirely by Pérez while Verstappen attempted to carry the team on his own back.

Pérez’s underperformance was directly responsible for the speed with which the team’s 115-point lead over McLaren evaporated.

It took McLaren only 11 rounds to take the lead from Red Bull Racing, and it ended up defeating the defending constructors champion by 77 points, completing a 192-point turnaround.

Red Bull Racing couldn’t even hold onto second place; it was usurped by Ferrari with four rounds remaining and went on to finish 63 points behind the Italian team.

With Verstappen still winning the title comfortably, Red Bull Racing became only the third team in history to finish third or lower in the constructors championship while fielding the drivers title winner.

To say Red Bull Racing lost the championship in 2024 rather than McLaren won it does the orange-clad team a serious disservice, not to mention underrates the excellent car it built that season.

But clearly there was more to the season than just McLaren’s rise.

Could McLaren realistically hope for Mercedes to suffer the same sort of implosion?

Cam Waters aiming for the Championship? | 01:03

WHERE THE PARALLELS END

The points picture is where the similarities between 2024 and today end — and it’s not just because of Pérez either.

The deficits are of different magnitudes.

In 2024 McLaren trailed Red Bull Racing by 115 points with 18 rounds to go.

This year McLaren trails Mercedes by 163 points with 12 rounds to go — and we’re assuming this is the peak of the deficit.

That’s 41.7 per cent greater deficit to be closed in 33.3 per cent less time.

In 2024 the team required had to outscore Red Bull Racing by 6.4 points per round to pinch the championship. In the end it pulled it off by outscoring RBR by 10.7 points per round.

This year McLaren must outscore Mercedes by 13.6 points per round — a 213 per cent increase in the 2024 target and bigger even than the team’s overperformance that year.

2026: average score per event

1. Mercedes: 35.8 points per round (Antonelli: 20.4 ppr, Russell: 15.4 ppr)

2. Ferrari: 28.5 points per round

3. McLaren: 19.5 points per round (Norris: 10.3 ppr, Piastri: 9.2 ppr)

4. Red Bull Racing: 15.1 points per round

The turnaround in 2024 was already unprecedented. McLaren would have to take that to another level with this weekend’s upgrade to have any chance of winning the title.

That’s particularly true given Russell and Antonelli are a well-matched line-up, whereas Verstappen and Pérez were not. McLaren can’t assume both its cars will at a minimum split the Mercedes drivers at any given race.

Kostecki DOMINATES in Townsville | 01:11

BUT THERE’S HOPE

If it sounds unlikely, that’s because it is.

But then again, 2026 is different to 2024 in other ways too.

While it may not be facing an adversary on the brink of collapse, Mercedes is by far the most unreliable frontrunning team this year. Though McLaren has suffered as a result of the Mercedes engine’s occasional frailty, the works team has been bit hardest.

Russell’s first-lap crash in Spa-Francorchamps also demonstrates another possible weakness that could turbocharge McLaren’s recovery: the intrateam title fight.It’s hard not to think frustration played at least a small part in Russell deciding to sweep around Hamilton’s outside in a risky first-lap move that was always likely to end in contact — whether that be frustration over his lack of engine power building up to that moment, frustration over his longer-running power struggles or frustration over what it meant in the broader title context.

McLaren could be the new pressure point Russell doesn’t need this season.

If you were being optimistic on McLaren’s part, you’d also be entitled to wonder whether Antonelli really can seal the deal in just his second season and in the year of his 20th birthday. He looks every bit the real deal, but there’s still plenty of time for him to drop the ball — see Piastri’s lead last season.

Finally, though, there’s the peculiar form guide of 2026.

Teams have leapt to the front and tumbled down the order almost solely on how recently they’ve brought their latest upgrade package.

McLaren, after all, almost won the Miami Grand Prix this year after bringing what to date is its only big update of the season.

Red Bull Racing did likewise in Austria, and Ferrari won in Barcelona with its upgraded car.

All three teams were on average further adrift of Mercedes before those big results than McLaren is adrift of Mercedes right now.

There’s no doubt Mercedes holds the whip hand in 2026. If it executes cleanly and keeps up the development pace, it can take the championship out of the hands of its rivals without needing to stretch.

But McLaren has form in delivering surprises. You’d be brave not to believe it has something up its sleeve.