Twelve months ago McLaren was untouchable. Now the reigning double world champion sits without a Grand Prix victory a third of the way through 2026, and the paddock can't settle on a single explanation for it.
Start with the standings, because they sting. The Race points out that Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, between them, have banked fewer points this year than Mercedes' runaway leader Kimi Antonelli has scored by himself. Two podiums apiece and a Norris win in the Miami sprint is the sum of McLaren's haul.
For The Race, the root cause is regulatory. F1's reset of the engine formula has handed the initiative back to the manufacturers, and for the first time since rejoining Mercedes in 2021 McLaren is feeling the limits of being a customer. The works team got on top of the new power units faster, the analysis argued, while McLaren chased data it didn't yet have and fought a string of reliability gremlins — an electrical fault that stopped both cars starting in China, a fresh battery for Norris in Japan, a gearbox failure in Canada, an engine in Monaco.
Andrea Stella, though, won't let the engine carry all the blame. "We have had issues pretty much in all areas of the car," the team principal said after Monaco, casting reliability as a car-wide failing rather than a Mercedes one. His aim, he says, is to "retain the standards of a championship-winning partnership." His boss has floated a bigger question: McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown has conceded the team will "at least conduct a preliminary evaluation" of running its own engine once F1 locks in its 2030 regulations, though customer life with Mercedes is still the intended path.
Jacques Villeneuve, speaking on Sky's F1 Show, isn't convinced this is a structural meltdown at all. To him it looks more like a team still paying for the energy it poured into last season's title scrap. He had nothing but praise for Norris — "driving like a champion," he said, squeezing the maximum from a car that can't win — while warning how brutal the midfield maths has become. "If you have two or three tenths difference, this could mean a podium or seventh or eighth. And that's how the group is in the middle."
Norris has pointed at something similar. As Sky's Matt Amos relayed, the champion reckons McLaren's prolonged 2025 duel with Max Verstappen meant the team "focused an awful lot on that and didn't prepare as much for this year."
There is a dissenting voice. Picking through the Barcelona data, the analyst behind Formula Insights reckoned the result undersold McLaren — Norris was "pretty much on par with George Russell" and his recovery drive to the podium "relatively well-deserved." On the circuit that should have punished McLaren's weakness, he found no evidence of it: the car, he said, "do not seem to have tyre issues there." His conclusion bucked the doom — "don't count McLaren out."
Where the three agree is the gap across the garage. Piastri's Barcelona, in Formula Insights' telling, was flat; Norris keeps dragging the McLaren forward. Engine, preparation or a rough run of luck — Austria will be the first real test of whose diagnosis holds up.
