This isn’t the kind of history Oscar Piastri signed up for.
Two rounds into the 2026 season, Piastri — who last year came within 13 points of the world title — is yet to complete a lap in a grand prix. He’s yet to even see the lights go out.
Never before in world championship history has a driver qualified but failed to start the opening two rounds of the season.
Fox Sports, available on Kayo Sports, is the only place to watch every practice, qualifying session and race in the 2026 FIA Formula One World Championship™ LIVE in 4K. New to Kayo? Join now and get your first month for just $1.
The closest anyone has come to such a feat was in 1964, when Tony Maggs didn’t enter the first race of the season and then qualified but failed to start rounds 2 and 3 in a customer BRM P57 fielded by the unlikely Scuderia Centro Sud.
His story shares some striking similarities with Piastri’s 2026 woe.
South African Maggs had qualified for the 1964 Dutch Grand Prix but crashed his car during pre-race practice and was unable to take the start. At the next race, in Belgium, an engine failure prevented him from lining up on the grid.
These are remarkable parallels, though they extend only so far. Centro Sud, an entrant of just 49 rounds, had none of the prestige of F1 grandee McLaren, nor did it exist in today’s hyper professional era.
These are, in other words, unprecedented times.
McLaren’s miserable double DNS in China, with Lando Norris succumbing to a similar but non-identical engine-related problem, is history of its own too.
It’s only the second time in McLaren’s two-car history that both its drivers failed to take the start. The other was the 2005 United States Grand Prix, when most of the grid withdrew after the formation lap amid a political storm over circuit safety.
Excluding USA 2005, the last time any team had both cars fail to start was at the 2002 Spanish Grand Prix, when Minardi took both Mark Webber — now Piastri’s manager — and Alex Yoong off the grid due to manufacturing defects related to its car’s rear wings.
Historically this is grim.
“It is a tough moment, that’s for sure,” McLaren boss Andrea Stella said. “If we consider that Oscar has not been able to start a race in this start of the 2026 campaign, that’s pretty difficult for Oscar to process.
“But at the same time, and this was testified and witnesses in the conversation with Lando and Oscar after the race, both remain quite positive.”
That’s because it’s not the crisis it looks like.
Even with two fewer races than expected this season, McLaren still has plenty of time to recover.
Unlike its precedents and parallels, McLaren is also the reigning constructors champion and should still be in a rich vein of form.
And while the circumstances are different, McLaren has a record of recovering from bad starts.
PIT TALK PODCAST: Andrea Kimi Antonelli becomes Formula 1’s 116th winner after claiming his maiden grand prix victory in China at the weekend, but it’s disaster for McLaren — and for Oscar Piastri, who’s now yet to start a grand prix in 2026 after a technical problem on the grid.
WHAT’S GOING WRONG?
McLaren’s double DNS is remarkable in the historical context, but the reason both cars failed to take the start is noteworthy in its own right.
“On Lando’s car, in preparation for the laps to the grid, we saw that there were problems with the electrical side of the power unit,” McLaren principal Andrea Stella explained. “We couldn’t communicate with this component.”
Reports suggested the hybrid battery was the affected part.
“We tried to rectify the problem. We tried to change as many parts as possible without having to change that part specifically, because it would take a long time and we couldn’t have made it to the start of the race.
“We reprogrammed, but there was no way to fix the problem, and Lando’s car was simply just not in a condition to leave the garage.”
Improbably, Stella explained the same part failed in Piastri’s car, though in a different way.
“The car was able to go to the grid with no issues at all, but once on the grid, the car wouldn’t fire up again,” he said.
“It appears to be a problem with the same power unit component on the electrical side but a problem of a different nature.
“It’s quite exceptional and uncharacteristic that you have two terminal problems pretty much at the same time on the same component.
“It looks like it’s just a coincidence that they happened at the same time, at the same grand prix and they were both of a terminal nature.”
While McLaren understood what had failed, it couldn’t say what the root cause of the issue is.
But Stella did say one thing was clear immediately.
“Obviously this is an area of the car which is not under McLaren’s control,” he said. “We rely entirely on what is reported by HPP (Mercedes High Performance Powertrains), and we trust completely their report.
“We will review together with HPP the reason for these faults, and like I’ve said to everyone in the team and to HPP, we go as a one team. As a one team we will face this disappointing day, and we will make sure that it doesn’t happen again in the future.”
It comes at a somewhat awkward time for McLaren given clear-the-air talks were reportedly held between Mercedes and its customer teams over the Chinese Grand Prix weekend.
In Australia, McLaren had edged towards what appeared to be criticism of Mercedes for being insufficiently forthcoming with information about how to get the most from its engines. Williams felt similarly.
Autosport has reported that Wolff called a meeting to try to allay such concerns and also to seek an agreement that his customer teams would dial down their public commentary.
It seemed to work, with McLaren saying in China that it believed it had closed much of the knowledge gap, only for the team to then effectively blame a Mercedes part for taking both cars out of the race — though Stella emphasised that McLaren and HPP would work as a united team to solve the problem.
Alonso retires with vibration issues | 00:23
UNRELIABILITY A FACT OF 2026
The double McLaren-Mercedes failure happened on a weekend another Mercedes power unit failure, also related to the battery, had George Russell stop on track and almost miss out on contending in Q3.
It’s early days, but these are the first signs that the Mercedes motor, despite clearly being the most competitive in the sport, could have an unreliability problem.
It’s notable that the works team and customer squads Alpine and McLaren both suffered reliability issues at various stages during pre-season testing.
Mercedes isn’t the only manufacturer facing reliability questions. Despite what on the whole was a very productive pre-season testing campaign for almost every team, the first two weekends of the season have been blighted by a surprising number of race-ending faults.
So far this year there’s been a stunning six cases of cars failing to even make it to the grid, McLaren’s China double included.
Including the Shanghai sprint, there have been nine failures to finish for the year to date, plus Lance Stroll’s unclassified finish in Melbourne, when he completed too few laps to be declared a finisher. Only one of those 10 failures was due to crash damage.
That’s a remarkably high attrition rate, albeit not quite as high as the 14 failures to finish in the opening two rounds of the 2014 season, the last time the engine rules changed.
McLaren has taken a large single dose on behalf of the Mercedes stable, but several other teams have also been suffering.
Red Bull Racing — this year with an in-house engine for the first time — has suffered two DNFs so far, for Isack Hadjar in Melbourne and Max Verstappen in Shanghai.
Audi recorded DNFs in Australia and the Shanghai sprint before a DNS for the China feature race, though the team was non-specific about its issues.
Honda’s dramas are well understood, with the team yet to have a car classified in a grand prix.
Only Ferrari appears so far to be immune from major dramas, with Cadillac’s problems ascribed to the team’s newcomer status.
You can look at this in one of two ways: that McLaren has been unlucky to be so badly affected, or that luck comes in swings and roundabouts for all teams and its misfortune will surely balance out by the end of the season.
Antonelli claims Chinese GP | 02:23
ENGINES AREN’T THE ONLY PROBLEM
“Annoying,” is how the typically understated Piastri described the drama.
But saliently he added: “Besides that, we know we’ve got work to do to find more performance.”
This is the crucial second part of the equation, because as much as McLaren feels that it hasn’t yet found the same level of engine performance as Mercedes despite equal machinery, it’s clear that its car isn’t up to the job yet.
It’s been only two rounds, but McLaren is clearly the third-best car, with only its giant-killing sprint qualifying performance pumping up its numbers relative to Ferrari.
Average gap to fastest, frontrunners
1. Mercedes: fastest
2. Ferrari: 0.725 seconds
3. McLaren: 0.742 seconds
4. Red Bull Racing: 1.134 seconds
Even if its single-lap pace looked competitive with Ferrari in China, in the sprint it was clear its race pace wasn’t in the same class.
Having the same power unit as Mercedes is the giveaway, even if it’s not getting as much out of it. The telemetry also backs up that McLaren has a chassis deficit, with the car slower through the corners than its Mercedes and Ferrari rivals.
But even if McLaren didn’t expect to start so far back, the team also didn’t think it would be starting on the front foot.
Stella said in January that the car used during pre-season testing would be largely unchanged for the opening rounds of the season. It finalised its launch-spec car late, so it was relatively mature in the first place, but it wanted to validate what it had before committing to manufacturing its first significant upgrade package.
That first big update is unlikely to be enough to close the gap to Mercedes, but it doesn’t mean it can’t get there once its development program starts delivering.
Charles Leclerc certainly believes the form guide will change significantly this year.
“I’ve said it multiple times, but I really think that this year is going to be all about development,” he told Sky Sports on Sunday, though he added: “But Mercedes is extremely strong, so … if we manage to turn that situation around, it would be very impressive.”
F1 makes call on Middle East races | 00:21
McLaren, though, has form here.
In 2023 it started with one of the grid’s worst cars, failing to score in the first two rounds while it dealt with a lack of reliability and pace.
But an internal restructuring turned the season around rapidly. An upgrade in Austria turned into success podium finished in Silverstone Budapest, and McLaren finished fourth in the constructors championship.
A better but still slow start in 2024 was flipped with its famous Miami upgrade that took Norris to his first victory. The team won the constructors championship at the end of the year, and last year it claimed both titles.
“I think what we have gone through at McLaren in terms of the journey from 2023 has been such a good journey of developing a culture, a mindset, of what we call internally a winner’s mindset,” Stella said on Sunday night. “(It’s) just a positive attitude which focuses us on what we can control.
“In this case there wasn’t much we could have controlled, so we just take any possible learning and we go again.”
“We say even looking at last year, when we won the double championship, the victory was not in Abu Dhabi; the victory was in Qatar and in Vegas for the way we withstood the difficulties. That’s where you really become a champion.
“Today is part of the same journey, which is the day you have to withstand a difficulty, you have to process it and you have to use it to become even more of a worthwhile champion in the future and gain the qualities to be a champion.
“That’s our mindset, and I’ve seen it completely at play today with Oscar, with Lando and with the team.”
It’s too early to say whether the points lost in China will sting in the final tally.
But McLaren has been here before. Even if the circumstances are different, it knows the outcome can be the same.
It’s too early to count the reigning constructors champion out of the running.