McLaren has the third-best 2026 car, but can't yet rely on one of its strongest assets

The start of 2026 has brought a precipitous bump back down to earth for McLaren. Flying high after securing both championships in 2025, the culmination of a steep development curve that had begun in 2023, the Woking squad has endured dismal luck at the start of this season.

When we arrive in the paddock at Suzuka, we'll hopefully get more of an explanation behind the apparently separate electrical issues between each car, which led to neither Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri making the start of the Chinese Grand Prix. What we do know, after Andrea Stella's explanation of the two issues, is that Norris' car had no communication between the internal combustion engine and the electrical components of the powertrain, and an electrical control unit (ECU) change did not remedy the problem. Piastri's car was initially problem-free on the way to the grid, but it wouldn't fire up again once it was there.

Cue the jokes about McLaren's unswerving loyalty to equal treatment, and Piastri's car not working out of sheer sympathy for its counterpart...

On paper, McLaren doesn't have a bad car. The MCL40 was, as chief designer Rob Marshall pointed out during a pre-season technical presentation at Woking, produced by the same people and in the same facilities as last year's championship-winning car; by that logic, it should be good. The problem is that it's not a Mercedes or a Ferrari, even though it's been very close to the SF-25 on pure pace terms in the opening two bouts of 2026.

Supertimes are often a good metric of where a car stands on absolute pace, taking its fastest lap time from a weekend and compared to the absolute fastest overall. Since Mercedes has been the quickest across the two weekends, it holds the 100% times. Ferrari is 0.865% away from that, and McLaren sits at 0.888% behind the W17 chassis. The McLaren has been a match for Ferrari in qualifying pace over the two full qualifying sessions and in China sprint qualifying, but the Ferraris have been a bit stronger in race trim. Not that there's much to compare the McLaren to, given there's a limited sample size owing to a trio of non-starters in grand prix sessions.

By comparison, Red Bull is 1.310% away from the Mercedes pace; McLaren's MCL40 is currently the third-fastest car on the grid. Despite registering one grand prix start, this pace is somehow reflected with third in the constructors' championship; the points it accrued in China's sprint race has pulled McLaren ahead of the two Red Bull-powered teams and Haas.

Oscar Piastri's McLaren has been a rare sight this year

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Yet, one of McLaren's great strengths - its Mercedes power unit - has not necessarily been something it can rely upon.

It's evident that the Mercedes powerplant is the class of the field. The Brixworth-designed power unit doesn't have the get-up-and-go of the Ferrari PU off the line, nor the straight-line deployment capabilities of the Red Bull-Ford package, nor the nerve-shattering vibrations of the Honda (okay, maybe that's not such a bad thing), but it's an all-rounder that excels in most situations.

And this had been the consensus long before the calendar flipped into 2026. Part of those expectations were likely based on Mercedes' brilliant start to F1's turbo-hybrid era back in 2014, but surely it's also a reputation built on the information brought into other teams by the transit of engineers around the grid.

The McLaren has been a match for Ferrari in qualifying pace over the two full qualifying sessions and in China sprint qualifying, but the Ferraris have been a bit stronger in race trim

The problem is that McLaren hadn't enjoyed much in the way of contact time with the current-spec power unit. During testing, Mercedes had introduced an updated variant of its M17 powertrain, while the other Mercedes-powered teams - McLaren, Alpine, and Williams - stuck with the unit that the works team had used in Barcelona. While this ensured that the three 'customer' teams could run reliably, and perhaps Mercedes' plan had been to take the hit on any reliability issues that arose with the new PU, it came at the cost of having to bed in a marginally different powerplant during the Australian Grand Prix lead-in.

Alpine has largely skirted around those issues, but Williams had endured a few issues during the Australia weekend. Carlos Sainz suffered with an ERS issue which cost him all of his Saturday running, but Williams has its own problems to contend with as its FW48 has not been entirely up to scratch among the early rounds. McLaren lost an entire race due to the lack of interface between the ERS and the rest of the power unit, plus a few more teething problems

During the Bahrain tests, Mercedes faced a few reliability problems of its own with its updated power unit. Antonelli lost almost the entire morning on the second day, barring three reconnaissance laps, with a fault that required an engine change. The Italian also had his final day curtailed as the team needed to embark upon another power unit swap. The Silver Arrows was not as much of an ever-present on the track as it had been in Barcelona, where it covered almost as much ground in the first day (694km) as it had in the opening two days of Bahrain (772km).

"Why doesn't ours work like that?" Stella inspects the Mercedes W17

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It could just be pure bad luck that McLaren had got hold of a couple of faulty electrical systems, and it'll all be fine in Japan with a fresh ERS. For all its prowess, however, it seems that the High Performance Powertrains division of Mercedes has a few creases it needs to iron out, or at the very least ensure that the support staff that the powertrain providers embed within each team have a few more tools in their belt to fix any similar occurrences.

And when the Mercedes powertrain has worked, McLaren says that it still has quite a bit to do to match the works outfit in terms of nailing the deployment aspect. While the powertrain data is generally shared between teams, ensuring that McLaren at least has access to some of the key figures demonstrating how to get the best out of its ERS, it doesn't have the first-hand experience. The ever-evolving deployment maps usually converge upon the best solution across a grand prix, an area where failing to start a race really begins to hurt.

Assuming a much smoother ride for the McLaren in Japan, the team should be set up to enjoy a solid weekend and must have a 5-6 finish set as its baseline expectations. Yet, the dearth of running in China very much hurts its chances of achieving more, particularly versus its closest neighbours (in performance terms) at Ferrari. The rudimentary addition of a 'spring break', following the cancellation of April's Middle Eastern rounds, might not necessarily be particularly welcome either after a stop-start set of opening rounds for the team.

It's not time for McLaren to panic by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly needs a smooth Suzuka weekend to at least give it some data to play with ahead of a fallow April.

Norris sits behind a Mercedes and a Ferrari during the China sprint

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