{"id":397435,"date":"2026-01-29T20:15:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-29T20:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/397435\/"},"modified":"2026-01-29T20:15:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T20:15:08","slug":"mclarens-early-setback-as-rivals-set-very-high-bar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/397435\/","title":{"rendered":"McLaren’s early setback as rivals set ‘very high bar’"},"content":{"rendered":"

McLaren suffered its first setback of 2026 on day two of Formula 1 testing at Barcelona.<\/p>\n

Oscar Piastri\u2019s running was ended early on Thursday as McLaren suffered a fuel system issue and opted to strip the car down fully to identify the source of the problem.<\/p>\n

Piastri completed just 48 laps, which is only a third of what test benchmark Mercedes has been managing each day.<\/p>\n

While not as dramatic a blow as Red Bull\u2019s day-ending shunt late on Tuesday<\/a>, performance technical director Mark Temple noted \u201cevery minute of track time is precious at such an early stage of the season\u201d.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe’ve gone out, we’ve got a good understanding of where the car is from a baseline point of view, but obviously we’ve had some issues,\u201d Temple said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe’ve not been able to do all the running that we would like.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe discovered a fuel system problem and the car’s very complex so we decided to bring it back into the garage, strip it down fully, understand where the problem is coming from.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

McLaren\u2019s end-of-day test summary noted that some competitors are already setting \u201ca very high bar for performance\u201d, so it knows this puts it behind the curve set by Mercedes.<\/p>\n

It comes after a solid opening day on track for the MCL40, which had not completed a shakedown prior to this week.<\/p>\n

McLaren delayed its debut to advance the car\u2019s development as much as possible and then to make sure it was properly prepared on-site at Barcelona.<\/p>\n

Lando Norris said Tuesday \u201cturned out to be a decent day\u201d and McLaren was \u201cquite happy\u201d with how well the car ran out of the blocks on day one, with chief designer Rob Marshall saying there were \u201cno nasties, no really scary things that went wrong\u201d.<\/p>\n

Gary Anderson’s verdict on the real 2026 McLaren F1 car<\/a><\/p>\n

Norris completed 76 laps, which was solid in the circumstances, although Mercedes managed 183 \u2013 and then completed its third and final day of on-track running on Thursday with another 168.<\/p>\n

It has brought Mercedes\u2019 to 500 laps in total across the test, which means McLaren would need to rack up almost 400 in a single day on Friday to match it.<\/p>\n

However, there are still six full days of testing to come in Bahrain next month, so while it leaves McLaren on the back foot for now, there is plenty of time to work through the more meaningful part of its preparations.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s a shakedown,\u201d Temple said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the most important things is for us to do the running, identify issues, dig into them so we can understand them, solve them and then have better running going into Bahrain and I think that’s clearly a big focus for us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"McLaren suffered its first setback of 2026 on day two of Formula 1 testing at Barcelona. Oscar Piastri\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":397436,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-397435","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}