Championship position: 3rd (one win; 220 points)
McLaren entered 2026 defending both World Championships, but its defense has been stuttering, stymied by a lack of grip and persistent reliability issues, prior to an uplift and buoyed confidence courtesy of Lando Norris’ emphatic victory at the pre-summer race in Hungary.
The MCL40 has been predominantly the third-best package across the opening half of the campaign, with McLaren also hampered by its status as a customer team, leaving it a step behind Mercedes in terms of understanding and optimizing the nuances of the complex power units. The greater focus on the 2025 championship fight and associated development also stymied early prospects.
“We realized just how heavy a price we had paid for the effort we put in during 2025 to secure the world double,” conceded Team Principal Andrea Stella.
There was also an early understanding that its initial direction with the early-spec MCL40 was not the correct path long-term, and a few mis-steps with components cost time before being amended.
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McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella (left) with 2025 World Champion Lando Norris.
“During the development I think we adopted some directions from a conceptual point of view, that as we learn more about the 2026 regulations, I would say that we are redirecting,” said Stella during McLaren’s struggles in the mid-part of the campaign. “And this, 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, and I think this couple of months is the delay that we have at the moment.”
“We realized just how heavy a price we had paid for the effort we put in during 2025 to secure the world double.”
Complaints during the mid-part of the European season from drivers just stemmed from an overall lack of rear-end grip, particularly in Barcelona, Austria, and Britain, where McLaren was marooned in a no-man’s-land, grabbing positions largely through the misfortunes of rivals. But that was counterbalanced by strong weekend-long displays in Japan, where Oscar Piastri was a legitimate victory contender, in Miami, where Norris won the Sprint and was in the mix in the grand prix, and in Hungary, where Norris did convert a marginal pole position into a comfortable win. Further sizable updates are due to the MCL40 in Azerbaijan as McLaren strives to become a consistent front-runner again.
“As a team, and with the car, we’re certainly not quite at the level we want to be at, or we were at last season,” Norris said. “We have still had some good results, but we also know we’re not where we should be. We’re not happy with that, we’ve been disappointed with our own performance, but we’re working hard to improve. We’re starting to see the benefits of that hard work—our win in Hungary came as a result of strong upgrades to the car—but we need to keep pushing and keep developing if we’re going to continue to fight for wins.”
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McLaren suffered a double DNS at the Chinese Grand Prix in March.
Reliability has been a particular bugbear, a sharp contrast from the ground effect era. McLaren has completed fewer racing laps in 2026 than only Aston Martin and Cadillac, with Norris and Piastri suffering three failures to finish—or even start—across the 11 grands prix. Those reliability setbacks have also struck at other stages of the race weekend, disrupting practice time, and sometimes leaving the drivers on the back foot in terms of understanding and optimizing the cars.
Reigning champion Norris has not had the package to defend his crown, but after a scrappy opening salvo has been one of the grid’s strongest performers. Norris understandably appears a more relaxed and assured competitor off the back of achieving his lifelong dream last year.
“I think in terms of my driving, and my own performance as a driver, honestly I’m very happy,” Norris says. “I feel like I have been doing a good job of maximizing the car’s potential. I feel like I’ve driven better in this half of the season than I probably did to this point last year, to a certain extent, but sadly I’m not leading the championship.”
On the other side of the garage it has now been almost a year since Piastri last tasted victory, and it has been an underwhelming half-campaign by the Australian. There have been highlights, such as two podiums and race-leading cameos in Japan and Hungary, but the underlying pace has been weaker than usual, there have been too many scrappy moments, and the regulations have blunted his previous tire-saving strong point. Character-building, to put it politely.
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“Definitely up and down” Piastri said. “I think our kind of general level of performance has not been quite where we want it to be, obviously. We’ve come close to some victories and had a few podiums, which has been good, but we obviously set the bar pretty high last year.”
Defending both championships remains a long shot, but the Budapest victory has left McLaren with a renewed sense of optimism in both its updated package and its direction.
“I believe that in recent years, once we’ve gained some momentum, we’ve been able to maintain it,” Stella said. “There are still 12 races left on the calendar, so there are plenty of opportunities given that 546 points are up for grabs. Of course, the gap in both championships is significant, but we remember last year’s lesson well: after all, I always tell the team that if we’ve set up a new display cabinet to house the new, recent trophies at the McLaren Technology Centre, then we have a duty to do our utmost to keep filling it.”
U.K.-based Phillip Horton started covering Grands Prix while still at university and swiftly deemed that writing about Formula 1 and the behind-the-scenes machinations was much more engaging than reading centuries-old novels. Degree gained, he went on to cover the sport full-time from 2014 and is as intrigued and excited by the destinations Formula 1 visits during its lengthy annual world tour as the racing itself. Phillip joined Autoweek in 2021 and while he has just about learned to spell in American English he has yet to find anywhere in America that makes a proper cup of tea.