A year since his last F1 win, what's gone wrong for Oscar Piastri?

McLaren’s own account of why the MCL40 regressed so sharply from its predecessor is worth setting alongside Piastri’s frustration, though it only tells part of the story – a difficult car explains why both McLaren drivers have had a harder season than 2025, not why one of them has had a harder one than the other.

Team principal Andrea Stella has pointed to two causes for the car’s struggles: first, that fighting Verstappen for the title deep into the 2025 season meant continued technical attention on the outgoing MCL39 at a point when rivals had already moved on.

Second, a deliberate design choice to prioritise a car that would develop well over the season rather than arrive fast out of the box, on top of reliability problems that cost both results and learning time in the opening round.

This month Stella described the team’s original aerodynamic concept for the 2026 rules as one it was actively “redirecting”, an admission that the initial direction had been wrong, with a lag of one to two months before any correction would show up on track.

Stella said building the MCL40 was something close to constructing an aircraft mid-flight, designing for a rules era nobody yet fully understood, adjusting as data arrived rather than before it did.

That’s a reasonable description of the first year of any regulation cycle, but it has meant Piastri and Norris spending 2026 driving a car whose competitiveness has been genuinely unpredictable from one weekend to the next, rather than one he can rely on to be simply good or bad.

The redirected upgrade Stella pointed to arrived in Hungary, which is what made Piastri’s pace in the first half of that race, before it all came apart, feel like the first real evidence that the correction might be working for him as it clearly worked for Norris, who dominated the race after his team-mate’s exit.

Hungary, in miniature

If you wanted one afternoon that captured the whole shape of Piastri’s year, the Hungarian Grand Prix would do.

He jumped Norris off the line and led for the best part of the race’s first half, genuinely the strongest he has looked all season.

Then a lapped Carlos Sainz, refusing to yield to blue flags, collided with him and cost him the position he needed to cover Norris’s pitstop.

Norris, freed into clean air, found half a second a lap and took the lead on pace alone.

Piastri’s radio message to his own pitwall afterwards needed no embellishment to make headlines: told by his engineer that the Sainz clash had cost him the position, he shot back, “Nice of you guys to factor that one in, by the way. Thanks.”

Thirteen laps later, a gearbox failure ended his race outright.

It was, in other words, a race lost to a backmarker and a mechanical fault rather than to his team-mate alone, and Piastri said as much afterwards, insisting that without the collision he would still have been ahead, even if Norris appeared to have the upper hand pace-wise.

The end result is that Piastri now sits seventh in the championship, now even behind Verstappen, while Norris has McLaren’s only win of the season so far.

That is the uncomfortable symmetry of Piastri’s last 12 months after he stood on the stop step of the podium at Zandvoort.

Some eight months ago, he was losing a championship to a team-mate in career-best form. Now he is losing ground to circumstances that often have very little to do with how well he is driving, which may be a more forgiving explanation, but is a far less satisfying one to live through.