How McLaren botched its F1 comeback — and what it means for Piastri’s first season

There’s a cruel irony to the fact that Oscar Piastri has sacrificed and grafted for nine years to earn a Formula 1 debut that lasted just 13 laps.

It’s safe to say it wasn’t the maiden outing as a Formula 1 driver the 21-year-old was hoping for.

The tone of a career is rarely set by the first race, certainly not for drivers of Piastri’s calibre, but the character of season sometimes is, and for the second year running McLaren, one of the greatest teams in Formula 1 history, embarrassed itself at the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix.

Other than a brief moment of optimism on Saturday night that its car troubles mightn’t be so bad if Lando Norris had been able to qualify 11th, Sunday gave way to full-blown misery as history repeated itself.

Norris, the only McLaren that made the distance — just — was dead last and two laps down. Piastri retired with electrical gremlins.

As dispiriting as it was for Piastri and Norris, it must be infinitely more demoralising for the hardworking McLaren designers, engineers and mechanics who are faced with another long season of stalled progress despite their best efforts to move forward.

The team’s last title — Lewis Hamilton’s drivers championship in 2008 — continues fading away in the rear-view mirror.

But it wasn’t supposed to be this way. McLaren, a historic grandee, was on the up and up only a few years ago, destined to return to its rightful place among the frontrunners.

In Lando Norris it had a star British driver to spearhead the recovery, and now in Oscar Piastri it has the most prized rookie of a generation.

How did things take such a negative turn so quickly?

The recovery wave was flatter than it looked

The first thing to consider is that the McLaren recovery that swept it up from its dire Honda years to that heartening third place in 2020 has been deceptively large. In reality progress has been much flatter.

The 2018 season was McLaren’s first after the breakdown in its Honda relationship and with Renault as its engine partner. It finished the season sixth, up from ninth, but because the team had deluded itself into thinking Honda was the only thing holding it back from its rightful place as a podium contender, this was considered a shocking low.

But in fact it would have finished even further down, in seventh, had the Force India team not collapsed in the middle of the season. Though it was reconstituted by Lawrence Stroll without missing a grand prix, its points tally was reset to zero after the summer break. Adding up the two halves of its season would have put it comfortably ahead of McLaren in the final standings rather than only just behind.

The 2019 season was the team’s first true genuinely decent campaign in the Honda aftermath, albeit fourth was a little flattering considering Racing Point, formerly Force India, slipped down the order as it reeled from the financial ructions of the previous 12 months.

Next comes 2020, the third-place finish that was supposed to herald the team’s inexorable rise. But that came with some major caveats.

That was the year Ferrari and the FIA struck their infamous confidential settlement on the eve of the season regarding the Scuderia’s power unit that sent the Italian team plummeting to sixth with an underpowered car, having finished second the year before.

Further, Racing Point, which won a race that season, was docked 15 points for a technical rule breach that effectively cost it a place in the championship to McLaren.

In ordinary circumstances the McLaren car would’ve finished the year fifth.

The 2021 season resulted in a meritorious fourth, albeit after being shown up for having a slow development rate relative to Ferrari, which caught and passed it for third by the end of the season.

And then last year McLaren was bumped back to fifth by Alpine in a battle that kept alive largely due to the French team’s woeful unreliability.

Of course you can only race against the competition you’re presented with, and none of this discredits the team’s results over those years.

But it pays to put McLaren’s results into context. While it’s obviously improved since its Honda years, it hasn’t risen anywhere near as sharply as the raw results suggest.

The team’s been talked about as a natural upper-midfielder and eventual frontrunner, but on true pace it belongs in the middle of the pack or perhaps a little lower.

Why has progress been so slow?

McLaren puts its recent stalled progress down to two major infrastructure works that were delayed by the pandemic and the team’s momentarily precarious financial position during the subsequent economic shocks of lockdown: a new wind tunnel and new simulator.

McLaren has historically had a reputation as one of the grid’s most technologically advanced teams, thanks in part to that purpose-built Woking factory, but that characterisation has been allowed to lapse in recent years as its once cutting-edge infrastructure has become dated.

The team’s current simulator was one of the first ever used in Formula 1, and its wind tunnel dates back to the factory’s opening two decades ago — so old that it’s been using the Toyota-owned wind tunnel in Cologne, some 500 kilometres away, for recent campaigns, and even that is showing its age.

Both the wind tunnel and the simulator, along with other factory upgrades, including new manufacturing infrastructure, are due for completion later this year. They will have some impact on next year’s car, but the calibration time required for the tunnel in particular will mean it won’t have its full affect on development until the 2025 car.

Certainly McLaren’s facilities explain part of the team’s woes, though it might be ambitious to write off its peculiar baked-in handling characteristics as down to infrastructure alone. One could also point to Aston Martin’s massive jump this year despite operating out of facilities first set up by Eddie Jordan for the 1991 season.

What it can’t explain, however, is why the last two years — crucial years considering the team’s aspirations — McLaren has rocked up to the start of the season looking badly undercooked.

Last year it had made a major cooling miscalculation ahead of testing under the new regulation that left it badly hamstrung in the first race — it was slowest of all — and that it couldn’t definitively fix for months.

This year the situation as much the same, with bodywork around the front axle attempting to break itself loose during the test. Norris’s car succumbed to a rare pneumatic pressure leak that required him to make six pit stops just to make it to the end, and Piastri’s car suffered an electronic systems failure.

Considering the team knew well in advanced this year that it hadn’t hit its development targets and would be off the pace early in the season, one would’ve thought making sure procedures and quality control would’ve been the top priority to ensure the team could maximise whatever opportunities for points might’ve come its way.

Instead in a race in which an Alfa Romeo and a Williams scored points, a McLaren car was once again at the very back of the field and two laps down.

Does it have to get worse before it gets better?

There is potentially good news on the horizon for McLaren fans, though.

As the team suggested during the pre-season, it gave up on the current MCL60 design some months ago in favour of an alternative direction. The flawed machine that embarrassed Woking is actually more of a rough draft long ago abandoned.

In April, for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, the team expects to bring a major revision to the car to bring it into line with its current thinking. It’s said it’ll be visually different and open more fruitful development directions to get it back on track to rise up the order under the current regulations.

It would be ambitious to think that it would suddenly put McLaren into the upper midfield mix — although Aston Martin has changed the game on how much development is possible year on year — but a return to stable, consistent results would be enough to push the team’s horror first weekend from its mind.

There’s also reason to think the next two races before Baku — Saudi Arabia and Australia — should be better.

Norris suggested after the Bahrain Grand Prix that his pace during his short 10-lap stints between pit stops seemed okay, and his lap chart suggests the MCL60 has approximate midfield potential — though it’s hard to make direct comparisons given the number of stops he made.

Further, last year McLaren managed to pull its act together after its shocking first round to perform pretty well in the following two rounds. Both drivers would’ve scored in Jeddah had Ricciardo’s car not failed, and they finished in five-six formation in Melbourne. Norris even scored a fortuitous podium in Imola.

Even then it’s difficult to imagine McLaren being more than the fifth-best car at most considering the steps taken by its rivals this year, and it says nothing about the team’s ultimate potential.

The sort of stagnation of the last few years won’t be snapped out of by some new infrastructure. There’ll need to be some serious deep thinking at Woking to decide if it’s in ideal shape to make the most of the tools coming to it later this year.

Piastri will just have to buckle in for the ride.