Talking points and analysis, McLaren battle with Mercdes, Oscar Piastri, problems with Honda engine, Ferrari form

What would it mean for Oscar Piastri to become the first Australian to win their home grand prix?

“If I had a dollar for every time I’d asked that, I’d be… a few dollars richer,” he joked before adding: “It would be really special.

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“Every driver wants to win their home race, and that’s no different for me.

“Having it as a season opener, there’s a larger element of the unknown there, but I’d love to win here.

“If we’ve got the car to do it — even if we don’t have the car to do it — I’ll be trying my absolute best.”

No local driver has so much finished on the podium in the world championship era of the Australian Grand Prix. Piastri came close last year, but ultimately he too befell what must now be considered a full-blown curse after spinning off the road in the rain.

Piastri — and perhaps any other Australian — has never been in a better position to break the drought. One of last year’s peak performers and racing for defending constructors champion McLaren, the signs are surely positive that he can finally get it done.

But the game is changing this year. Melbourne is the first round of Formula 1’s all-new era. Conventional wisdom no longer applies.

PIT TALK PODCAST: With just days before the opening grand prix of the season, Michael and Matt run the rule over the field to come up with a form guide for Melbourne — including the clear standout and Formula 1’s crisis team of 2026.

CAN McLAREN BEAT THE MERCEDES WORKS TEAM AGAIN?

McLaren doesn’t know whether it’s been able to continue its momentum from last season, when it dominated the constructors championship.

The team was solid in testing, but consensus suggests it wasn’t quite as spectacular as Mercedes — and McLaren isn’t willing to make itself an exception in a pre-season dominated by the top teams insisting they’re not the favourite.

“I don’t think we’re far behind — if we are,” Piastri said. “I don’t know if we are behind at all. The feeling is we’re in the mix but not right at the pointy end, so if we can find a little bit more, then hopefully we can be right at the pointy end.”

The favourite tag belongs instead to Mercedes — though George Russell, the bookies choice for drivers champion, isn’t buying the hype.

“It doesn’t change anything,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of chat around us, Mercedes, and we take it as a compliment.

“However, once the helmet’s on and the visor’s down, you’re just flat out and you don’t really think about any of this additional noise. Just take it race by race and see how we go.”

He did admit, however, that the atmosphere at the team was positive after years of delivering cars under the previous rules that failed to perform.

“The morale is definitely different, but I think this is more to do with the fact that the car is performing as we expected,” he said. “What was very important is seeing the correlation is good, there’s no major scares on the car.

“The engine looks strong … the package looks good, so that is probably the biggest reason why the morale is high, and you need that at the start of any new regulations to build upon.

“We feel we’ve got a very good chance.”

McLaren dispensed with the conventional wisdom that only works teams win titles when it claimed back-to-back constructors championships in 2024–25. Some of that is due to the regulations, which mandate that customer teams have access to identical hardware and software.

However, with these complex engines, the belief is that works status will once again become critical given the manufacturers had been working with their engines long before customers like McLaren got their hands on them.

If McLaren is going to win the title this year — if it’s going to win this weekend’s race or any other this year — it’ll need to prove convention wisdom wrong again by beating the works Mercedes team.

IS FERRARI THE REAL DEAL?

McLaren, though, isn’t tipped as Mercedes’s closest challenger. That status belongs to another works team: Ferrari.

The Scuderia abandoned development of last year’s underwhelming car early to focus on its 2026 challenger, and the Italian team ended testing in what looked like strong shape after a low-key start.

The change in vibe is palpable. The dark clouds that hung permanently over the team last year appear to have cleared, and optimism has returned.

“There’s definitely positivity around the team,” Charles Leclerc said.

“I think we did a good job, and on that we should be satisfied.

“I don’t think it means much going forward, because it’s very, very early days, and I don’t think anybody really showed their real potential, so we will only see after qualifying.

“But surely I prefer to be in the position where we are here to calm the expectations down rather than having to manage a lot of negativity around the team. That’s always a bit of a better situation to be in.

“We’ve taken clear conclusions and that will help us massively to start the season on the right foot and maximising our potential. Then where our potential is, it’s difficult to know for now.”

Lewis Hamilton was cautious about placing Ferrari in the pecking order, but he didn’t shy away from setting victory as a target.

“The goal is to win,” he said. “That’s what we’re working towards. Every team is, but that’s our goal — to maximise every opportunity, to be hopefully fighting in the top group, hopefully in the first races.

“We don’t really know. Mercedes looked particularly quick, and I’m not really sure whether we’ve seen the full, unleashed Red Bull yet.

“But whatever the case, I feel like I’ve got a great group of people behind me who are head down focused on bringing performance and really maximising every weekend.”

No matter the result this weekend, every team is warning that performance in Australia won’t necessarily be indicative of performance for the season. That’s partly because the development race is expected to be conducted at a ferocious pace, but it’s also because Melbourne is an outlier for power unit management, and given the importance of the power unit to a good result, Albert Park may not represent the true picture.

But Ferrari fans should consider another reason not to get ahead of themselves in the event of victory.

The Scuderia has won four of the last seven Australian grands prix, more than any other constructor in that time period.

But in neither 2017, 2018, 2022 or 2024 did victory in Melbourne precipitate either the constructors or the drivers title. The best it did in any of those seasons was to win five more grands prix.

Victory this weekend would be a welcome and important boost for the Scuderia after a dire winless campaign last season, but in the grand scheme of the championship, it may not signify much.

WHAT ABOUT THE NEW POWER UNITS?

Formula 1 changed the engine rules this year to attract new manufacturers to the sport, in particular Audi. Given it successfully attracted the German marque, you could declare the new regulations a success already.

Audi is one of two or three — depending on how generous you’re feeling — new engine manufacturers on the grid this year.

F1 has been hunting a Volkswagen brand for the grid for decades, and Audi has given it exactly what it’s always wanted: not just a motor but a full works team too.

But we shouldn’t forget that Audi was Sauber last year, the long-time independent team. That’s a low base from which to start, and combined with its first-attempt power unit, expectations should be kept in check despite Audi’s considerable pedigree.

Then again, Red Bull Powertrains appeared to be proving you don’t need to have built an engine before to have a good crack at Formula 1.

Red Bull’s first F1 motor, built in a brand-new facility on the same campus as Red Bull Racing, turned heads in testing for what looked like superior efficiency. Even if it didn’t seem to keep the same edge throughout pre-season that had rival manufacturers initially claiming it could be the best in class, it’s certainly kept itself in the ballpark at least.

“I’m very happy with what we did in the pre-season,” said Max Verstappen. “It’s been a really great and proud moment for everyone, how the whole project came together between the engine and the car.

“I was really positively surprised with how basically everything felt also. The rule changes have been really complex for everyone, but in terms of the feeling in the car, driving experience between the engine and the car, it was good.

“I think we want to be a little bit faster, and naturally I think everyone always wants to be faster, but from the things that I think we learned in Bahrain, we were not the quickest — but I have no idea; we’ll just see where we are here.”

Red Bull’s strong start has only compounded the woe at Honda, the third ‘new’ manufacturer.

The Japanese brand had been supplying the Red Bull teams until the end of last season, but its decision to withdraw at the end of 2021 — even if it walked back from a full exit — meant it lost many experienced engineers to other Honda departments or to F1 rivals.

It makes this at least a newish project — and this newish project so far has been disastrous.

The engine is literally shaking itself to death, with the hybrid battery failing due to extreme vibrations for which Honda is yet to identify a cause.

Worse, the shaking through the chassis is so bad that the drivers fear permanent nerve damage in their hands if they complete more than a dozen laps or so.

It means Aston Martin and Honda definitely won’t complete the race on Sunday, but by then we’ll have an even clearer picture of just how dire a situation the partnership is in.

CAN F1’S NEW TEAM AVOID THE BOTTOM?

Cadillac will become Formula 1’s first new team in a decade this season when Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas hit the track in the first ever General Motors-backed grand prix team.

It hasn’t been a long time coming.

The team had its entry confirmed little more than a year ago — barely any time at all for a project being built from the ground up, even if the foundations had been laid by Michael Andretti with his ill-fated bid to join Formula 1.

Andretti was denied entry in part because Formula 1 claimed he had underestimated the challenge of competing in top-tier motorsport and that his team would therefore be shambolically uncompetitive at the back of the field and a drag on the sport’s image.

Cadillac, however — fundamentally the same team by a different name and without Michael Andretti involved — has looked anything but shambolic so far.

Thoroughly competent throughout testing to set a reasonable number of laps, the team looks in good shape to start the first chapter of its history.

That’s not to say its year won’t be spent mostly at the back of the pack — no-one expects greatness from the team’s first car.

“Progress,” said Bottas when asked what the team was aiming for this year. “That’s the number one thing.

“We need to get better from the start of the year to the end of the year, which I hope we will.

“We’ve had hard work already, but the hard work continues going ahead. With the new power units, with the new cars, it’s the same for everyone, but we have been building everything from scratch, so we need to keep going, keep getting better in all the areas.”

But in a small early win for Cadillac, it’ll be virtually assured of finishing inside the top 20 if either car sees the chequered flag given Aston Martin is unlikely to make the distance.

Aston Martin thinks it would be in much better competitive shape without its Honda engine dramas, and that may be true, but if fixes don’t come along soon, Cadillac may dare to dream it could even avoid a last-place championship finish in what would be a truly remarkable outcome.

CAN ARVID LINDBLAD START ON THE FRONT FOOT?

After a glut of rookies made their full-time debuts last season, in 2026 only one driver is new to the grid.

Arvid Lindblad will suit up in Racing Bulls colours this weekend, his first as a Formula 1 driver.

“This is what I’ve been working towards my whole life,” he said. “This was my goal, my dream, when I started when I was five, so the fact that it’s coming true is obviously something I’m very excited for.

“In F1 everything’s a step up, so it’s a different vibe. There’s a bit more going on, but I’m just trying to stay focused on the important bit, which is the driving.”

Lindblad is in a potentially interesting position in the Red Bull program.

Rumours last year suggested the Briton was given his contract unilaterally by former Red Bull adviser Helmut Marko in one of his final acts for the brand before splitting suddenly at the end of 2025.

Speculation suggested Yuki Tsunoda had been in with a real shot at returning to Racing Bulls once it was clear he wouldn’t continue at Red Bull Racing before Marko gave away the seat alongside Liam Lawson.

Lindblad has long been highly rated inside the Red Bull program, but his Formula 2 campaign last season was far from stellar, featuring just one feature race victory culminating in a distant sixth in the championship. Another year in the series may have done him well.

Instead he’s been thrown into the deep end alongside the wily Lawson, who will revel in his first full pre-season and full-time campaign with one team. He won’t be easy to beat, and if he can’t get one over the Kiwi, who has already been rejected by Red Bull Racing, then it’s hard to see how he can argue for a promotion to the senior squad.

Of course he doesn’t have to fire immediately. Isack Hadjar crashed out of the Australian Grand Prix on the formation lap and still ended the year with his promotion papers.

Marko and Christian Horner’s departures last year might also make the entire program less cutthroat, buying him time.

But you only get so much time to state your case no matter where you are on the grid. Lindblad’s time starts now.