McLaren Driver Ready to Start Racing After Two Missed Grand Prix
Two races into the 2026 Formula 1 season, Oscar Piastri has yet to start a Grand Prix, something no one expected coming off last year. A crash on the formation lap in Australia immediately put him behind, and just a week later in China, a technical issue stopped him before he could even get on track. At this point, his goal going into Japan is simple. He just needs to start the race. This situation also reflects a rough start overall for McLaren, which came into the season as defending champions but now sits P3 in the standings, already 49 points behind second. For a team that looked so dominant last year, this drop has been noticeable and frustrating.
Piastri, however, has handled the situation with maturity. After the first DNS, his reaction was mostly one of disbelief, but by the second race weekend, he had shifted his approach. Instead of focusing on what went wrong, he stayed engaged by watching the race closely from the paddock and learning as much as possible. At the same time, he has been using the simulator consistently to stay sharp, making sure he does not fall behind despite not racing. There are still some positives to take away from this. He qualified P5 in both races and managed to score three points in the sprint, which shows the pace is still there. His teammate, Lando Norris, has also been able to extract 15 points from the car, showing that when things go right, the performance is still there.
The bigger issue right now is reliability, and that is what is holding McLaren back more than anything else. They have only managed one top ten finish so far and had a double DNS in China, which is a huge loss of points early in the season. That kind of inconsistency is hard to recover from, especially when teams like Ferrari and Mercedes are capitalizing on every opportunity. If McLaren can clean up these issues, they still have the pace to fight at the front, but the margin for error is shrinking fast. For Piastri, finishing a full race weekend could be the turning point; for McLaren, fixing reliability will determine if last year’s success was just a one-off or the start of a new era.
