Oscar Piastri tempers McLaren hopes for 2026 Australian GP

Oscar Piastri has warned that fans should not expect McLaren to be as strong as they were in Melbourne 12 months ago at the 2026 Australian Grand Prix.

Anticipation continues to build for the first race of a new era in Formula 1, and while Piastri does expect McLaren to be somewhere among the top four teams, he stresses that McLaren “certainly” does not have the level of performance which it did versus rivals back at the 2025 season-opener.

Oscar Piastri cools 2026 Australian GP expectations

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McLaren was the class of the field in Melbourne 2025, as eventual World Champion Lando Norris took the win, seeing off the potent threat of Max Verstappen, while Piastri was restricted to ninth after spinning in the wet.

But, the sport has been overhauled since the end of last season with new-look cars and engines having arrived on the scene.

The first of two Bahrain tests are complete, and while it is generally accepted that McLaren, Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari remains the top four, those teams are passing the parcel that is the pacesetters tag around.

“Where we are in the pecking order, I don’t know,” Piastri confirmed to PlanetF1.com and others in Bahrain.

“I think it kind of looks like the top four teams are still the top four teams, but I don’t know where exactly we sit in that at the moment.”

So, to phrase it another way, should the first race in Australia be tomorrow, rather than on 6 March, then where would Piastri expect McLaren to shake out.

“I certainly don’t think it’ll be the Australian Grand Prix we had last year, unfortunately, in terms of performance,” he cautioned. “Hopefully it’s a bit different in terms of results!

“But yeah, we’re certainly not going to come out and have the performance we had in Melbourne last year.

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“But, I mean, there’s so many things now that all the teams need to still sort out, need to get right. The difference between getting these things right and wrong is not a few hundredths of a second, or even a few tenths of a second. It’s a lot. It’s upwards of half a second, sometimes, if it goes really wrong.

“So I think everyone’s got a lot of things to sort out, because I think we probably don’t even know what our true pace is, because we don’t know what problems are just inherent that we can’t fix. We don’t know what problems we can fix tomorrow. We don’t know what problems we can fix for race one.

“I think all 11 teams will be having similar thoughts.”

The teams have three more days of testing in Bahrain to fine tune the cars before heading for Albert Park.

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