New to Kayo? Join now and get your first month for just $1.<\/a><\/p>\nIt was 0.629 seconds off the pace over a single lap \u2014 its second-worst performance since the Melbourne season-opener \u2014 and though Lando Noris walked away with fourth at the end of a heavily attritional grand prix, McLaren had by far the worst race pace of any of the frontrunning teams.<\/p>\n
After an optimistic early part of the season, with Piastri and Norris coming close to winning in Japan and Miami respectively, Silverstone suggested the team\u2019s demoralising slide to the back of the frontrunning pack was complete.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think being such a step behind was a little bit of a surprise for us, but \u2026 that\u2019s where we are,\u201d Piastri concluded.<\/p>\n
After nine rounds, McLaren has four podiums from 15 starts and trails Mercedes by 154 points. It has the fewest point-scoring finishes of any of the frontrunners, with just 11 top-10 appearances, and is the only one of the four leading teams to have not yet qualified on the front row of the grand prix grid with either car.<\/p>\n
Last year McLaren romped to its second consecutive constructors championship and claimed its first drivers title since 2008.<\/p>\n
Just months later, the team is scrambling to keep up in the battle to challenge Mercedes.<\/p>\n
Leclerc wins amidst safety car confusion | 03:32<\/p>\n
THE COST OF CHAMPIONSHIP CONTENTION<\/p>\n
The prospects of a McLaren dynasty were always shaky thanks to the expiring regulations. A team builds momentum through rules stability, which allows it to compound its success over consecutive seasons.<\/p>\n
Not only did the rules change this year, but the suite of reforms is perhaps the largest in the sport\u2019s history, with both engine and chassis regulations ripped up and rewritten.<\/p>\n
While the biggest teams have still emerged ahead \u2014 there\u2019s still a gap from the frontrunning four to the midfield \u2014 McLaren hasn\u2019t been able to extend its 2025 advantage.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s not just that the rules have changed; it\u2019s that McLaren was preparing for the new regulations while also working hard to seal last year\u2019s championship double.<\/p>\n
Though the constructors title was all but won early, with the team stitching it up in Singapore with six rounds remaining, Max Verstappen\u2019s almighty title run-in kept McLaren more focused on 2025 than it would have liked.<\/p>\n
\u201cDefinitely I would say that having been in the championship so tight with Red Bull \u2014 and Verstappen in particular in the drivers True cost of McLaren\u2019s title push laid bare… and why there\u2019s a glimmer of hope for Piastri \u2014 needed some of our attention in terms of keeping working on the car,\u201d McLaren principal Andrea Stella said, per The Race.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven if we didn\u2019t bring big upgrades, we definitely needed to keep paying attention from a technical point of view at the MCL39 because we needed to make sure that we maximised our performance race by race, because the challenge from Verstappen was becoming more and more material.\u201d <\/p>\n
Verstappen was an improbable 104 points off the title lead with nine rounds remaining last year. He outscored Norris by 68 points and Piastri by 115 points to fall just two points shy of the championship.<\/p>\n
McLaren outscored Red Bull Racing \u2014 for whom Yuki Tsunoda was contributing very little \u2014 by just 12 points during the same time.<\/p>\n
Red Bull Racing triggered the diversion. Having struggled in the first part of the season, team boss Laurent Mekies said he was sticking with the 2025 car at the expense of 2026 because it was imperative the team understood why its development tools didn\u2019t seem to be working.<\/p>\n
McLaren, determined to seal the drivers title, had no choice but to respond.<\/p>\n
Unsurprisingly, both teams have looked less convincing than Ferrari and certainly Mercedes.<\/p>\n
‘F*** THIS’ Verstappen rages after crash | 01:09<\/p>\n
WRONG CONCEPT<\/p>\n
Disrupting and compressing the 2026 timeline has led to a somewhat compromised new car that so far has proved difficult to develop.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we adopted some directions from a conceptual point of view that, as we learn more about the 2026 regulation, I would say we are redirecting,\u201d Stella said, admitting that the team had pursued the wrong car concept this season.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis, like everything, especially from an aerodynamic point of view, is not something that you can get to converge in the space of a week. It normally takes one or two months.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis couple of months is the delay that we have at the moment. We see that it\u2019s probably two, three months, the space between which we see upgrades from the top teams.\u201d<\/p>\n
Effectively McLaren is one cycle of upgrades behind the other leaders as it changes development course.<\/p>\n
All the frontrunners, including McLaren, brought major updates between Miami and Canada in May. Ferrari and Red Bull Racing rolled the dice again in Barcelona and Austria.<\/p>\n
McLaren has been bringing smaller updates along the way but nothing to match those big steps, leaving it well off the pace.<\/p>\n
We can see that clearly in the data.<\/p>\n
McLaren\u2019s best weekend by far was in Miami, where it secured its only double podium of the season \u2014 after finishing one-two in the sprint \u2014 and was just 0.071 seconds slower than Mercedes over a single lap.<\/p>\n
Between Barcelona and Silverstone, however, it\u2019s been a chunky 0.447 seconds off the pace, behind all three other leading teams.<\/p>\n
Though all of Mercedes\u2019s rivals are moving closer to the front, McLaren is doing so at by far the slowest pace.<\/p>\n
The car is draggy and struggles to get its tyres into the right operating window \u2014 but even when it does, it doesn\u2019t appear to have the same advantage on tyre management that it did over the last couple of seasons.<\/p>\n
Piastri also reported that it struggled in recent weeks in high winds, something wide-open Silverstone tends to expose.<\/p>\n
Verstappen crashes out in British GP | 02:19<\/p>\n
Notable too is that not all of the parts McLaren has brought to the car have worked.<\/p>\n
Its first big upgrade package included a front wing that was taken off the car immediately and took several rounds to appear, with the team needing time to get it to work as expected after making further tweaks.<\/p>\n
It brought a new rear wing to Austria, two rounds ago, but it\u2019s yet to make it onto the car at all, with the team not confident its take on the Ferrari\/Red Bull Racing rotating device would work as expected.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a departure from the seemingly surefire success of McLaren car upgrades in recent years, when every part brought to the car seemed to work straight out of the box and deliver meaningful performance improvements.<\/p>\n
The test of McLaren\u2019s changed direction will come next weekend in Hungary, where the team hopes its season can be turned around by its next major upgrade package following its conceptual change of direction.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy 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,\u201d Stella said, per the F1 website.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause we have cleared our ideas as to which are the directions to follow in terms of aerodynamic development, we see now that the development is more sustained than what we had in some phases last year while defining the launch specification.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn my trajectory, I think we are going to close the gap with another step of upgrades, so ideally we will be able to deliver upgrades in the short term and upgrades in the mid term, and hopefully by then the others have not disappeared too far in front in the championship.\u201d<\/p>\n
Payne extends title lead after race 21 | 02:07<\/p>\n
WHAT ABOUT THIS WEEKEND?<\/p>\n
Without that upgrade, there\u2019s a sense of this weekend\u2019s Belgian Grand Prix being a case of grinning and bearing the pain.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s worth noting, though, that McLaren\u2019s only win in the last 13 Belgian grands prix came just last year at the hands of Piastri.<\/p>\n
The Australian has made Spa-Francorchamps, one of the world\u2019s most fearsome racing circuits, a happy hunting ground, being one of the nine venues at which he\u2019s won a race.<\/p>\n
Piastri has collected 57 points across his three visits, putting it behind only the Qatar Grand Prix in terms of points scored, and he\u2019s spent 294 kilometres in the lead in Belgium, second to only Zandvoort in terms of controlling a race.<\/p>\n
On average he\u2019s been 0.223 seconds quicker than Norris across all qualifying formats at the circuit, and he\u2019s yet to be beaten by his teammate in a race or a sprint when both have seen the chequered flag.<\/p>\n
Capitalising on those strengths, though, will take more than a bit of individual brilliance.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are fully aware that after a difficult British Grand Prix, mainly in terms of pure performance, even this round won\u2019t be that easy, so we won\u2019t be expecting any big change in terms of competitiveness,\u201d technical director Neil Houldey warned.<\/p>\n
But there are some reasons to hope for a better showing.<\/p>\n
The first is that the team says it will finally run with its version of the rotating rear wing, which Houldey thinks \u201cwill add a bit of performance\u201d.<\/p>\n
This trick part is about boosting aerodynamic efficiency by creating a much larger opening in the rear wing, which sheds downforce but also slashes drag. It means the car can run with more downforce in the corners knowing it won\u2019t penalise it as much down the straights.<\/p>\n
Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps is a high-efficiency track, with high-speed, downforce-sensitive corners in the middle sector linking long straights in the first and third splits. It\u2019s at this sort of track that the part will pay the biggest dividends.<\/p>\n
Kostecki DOMINATES in Townsville | 01:11<\/p>\n
The second is that McLaren will get access to Mercedes\u2019s latest engine.<\/p>\n
The team was denied the latest specification when it was introduced for the works team two rounds ago because its then current engines weren\u2019t at the end of their life cycles. Each car is limited to a certain number of engine components, and introducing a new engine early would have put that delicate program out of sequence.<\/p>\n
Ironic is that McLaren was out of sequence in part because it had failed to start the Chinese Grand Prix due to engine problems.<\/p>\n
The new power unit is a reliability upgrade, not a performance one, but the German marque has talked about having had to rein in its engine slightly while it searched for a fix.<\/p>\n
McLaren presumably has had to do the same, but from this weekend it will be able to access the power unit\u2019s full potential again \u2014 critical on a track with so many flat-out blasts.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Belgian Grand Prix is going to be incredibly challenging from an energy management perspective; it\u2019s one of the most energy-starved tracks on the calendar,\u201d Houldey said. \u201cWe anticipate seeing a significant amount of super clip, which will test both the car and the drivers.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s still the question, however, of whether McLaren understands how to get the best from the engine. At most races this year, including last time out in Silverstone, McLaren has struggled relative to the works team with energy harvesting and discharging, which has left both cars down on speed on the straights.<\/p>\n
Mercedes is also reportedly exploiting a loophole in the rules that allows it to use full electrical power at certain points on the track where other teams, including those with Mercedes engines, cannot.<\/p>\n
This is a critical gap. Not all of it can be closed \u2014 some of it is down to gear ratios, which are locked in for the season \u2014 but some of it is effectively free lap time. It\u2019s clearly just taking time to develop the same deep understanding as the works team.<\/p>\n
A circuit like Spa-Francorchamps will be revealing in whether any lessons were learned in Silverstone.<\/p>\n
McLaren, Piastri and defending champion Norris are a long way from the top of the title order, but the next two rounds of racing will tell us whether there\u2019s any chance they can get back there with time enough to influence the season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWe weren\u2019t great, obviously,\u201d Oscar Piastri was typically understated in his review of McLaren\u2019s dire British Grand Prix…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":803181,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,817,813,816,85],"class_list":["post-803180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=803180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803180\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/803181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=803180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=803180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=803180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}