As The Race reports, McLaren has gone from fighting at the front and chasing second in the constructors' championship to a worrying slump that leaves them vulnerable to a resurgent Red Bull for third in the standings. A miserable triple-header across Azerbaijan, Malaysia, and Singapore yielded just 33 points, exposing a sudden lack of pace and a car that has proven wildly difficult to tame.
The problems stem from a combination of track layouts and inherent car traits. The McLaren package struggles heavily in low-speed corners, on corner entry, and down the straights due to excessive drag and short gear ratios. Baku was expected to be tough, but Malaysia turned into a bizarre outlier. Track surface roughness ruined tyre grip and aerodynamics, leading team boss Andrea Stella to cite "weird data" while Lando Norris noted that "a lot of things stopped working from an aero point of view."
We need something more fundamental than simply adding some downforce to the car,
Operational mistakes and driver errors compounded the misery. In Baku, Norris and Oscar Piastri both suffered damaging lock-ups, with Norris sliding off at Turn 1 before being wiped out in a multi-car restart crash caused by Franco Colapinto, while Piastri also went off while running in podium contention. Malaysia brought a poor strategy call on tyres and another costly error from Norris, who drifted through the Turn 1 gravel behind the safety car. By the time a silly clash occurred in the Singapore sprint, nearly 40 points had slipped away.
Qualifying numbers paint a grim picture. Across the triple-header, McLaren's lead car was the slowest of the lead group in three of the four qualifying sessions, averaging 100.54% of the fastest lap compared to Mercedes at 100.22%, Red Bull at 100.24%, and Ferrari at 100.36%. Even Singapore, where Norris finished fourth and Piastri fifth, saw Norris easily beaten by Kimi Antonelli after going off while battling Lewis Hamilton, while Piastri only salvaged his race thanks to a slow puncture that forced a beneficial late tyre switch.
Driving the MCL40 has become an exhausting mental test. Norris admitted the car is "too difficult to drive" and "just on a knife edge on every single corner," forcing the driver to push every single percentage without letting the machine do any work. Stella and Piastri have echoed these sentiments, noting that the car bleeds lap time if driven even slightly under the absolute limit.
While a sizeable aero package is coming for the US Grand Prix at Austin to eat into a representative 0.3s deficit, Stella conceded that adding downforce will not fix the deeper issues. "We need something more fundamental than simply adding some downforce to the car," Stella said, noting that deeper structural changes are being addressed for the MCL41 in 2027.
