Five teams in most trouble after F1's 2026 season opener
The first round of a season need not set the tone for the full season, much less a full Formula 1 regulations cycle - but you'd still much rather start well than not.
On evidence of the pre-season and the Australian Grand Prix, here are the F1 teams who face the longest road from where they are to where they want to be - a 'bottom five' ranked from least to most in trouble.
5 McLaren
McLaren had always suspected it was coming into the campaign slightly on the back foot compared to works teams Mercedes and Ferrari.
But the scale of the deficit to the top squads was a surprise. World champion Lando Norris came home more than 50 seconds adrift of race winner George Russell, equating to a difference of nearly a second per lap.
That deficit was slightly exaggerated by the fact that Norris spent much of his race battling for position, which cost him time, rather than running in the clear air that Russell had after his pitstop. "The gap at the moment seems to be in the range between half a second and one second," suggested team principal Andrea Stella.
McLaren's chassis is no longer the benchmark. It is working on some imminent upgrades that it hopes will bring much-needed laptime.
Of bigger priority right now, though, is getting more on top of energy management. The gulf between what it is doing with its Mercedes power unit and what the Mercedes team is doing was laid bare in Melbourne.
Tenths of a second are being lost by McLaren on straights because it hadn't got its harvesting-and-deployment tactics totally right. And now it needs to find out why - and whether there's a fundamental knowledge limitation borne out of its customer status.
4 Cadillac
Having got one car to the finish of its first race was definitely cause for some celebration at Cadillac.
But there's no escaping that the competitive picture in Melbourne offered it a reality check.
Not only was the Aston Martin well-sorted enough over a single lap at Albert Park that there was no contest between the two come qualifying, but Cadillac was also 1.3s behind the next real midfield car. And, come the race, it was the only team to finish three laps down.
Ignore Haas as a famous outlier given its collaboration with Ferrari - but recall how the three debuting F1 teams before that fared in their first round in 2010.
Q1 deficit on debut (%)
Cadillac (2026) +3.897%
Virgin (2010) +4.464%
Lotus (2010) +4.572%
HRT (2010) +7.528%
It's a wholly different team, wholly different era, completely different circumstances. But you cannot take for granted that a gap like this can be closed down sufficiently - after all, those three never did.
Yes, it was only round one. And yes, there may well be low-hanging fruit in optimisation. But any faint hopes of latching onto the back of the midfield pack at some point have surely been waved goodbye to for now.
3 Alpine
Buoyed by its Mercedes customer engine switch, at the cost of a very publicly messy closing of its Viry F1 programme, left Alpine optimistic about its competitive prospects for 2026. Writing off almost all of 2025 should've been an aid, too.
Yet neither Pierre Gasly nor Franco Colapinto looked close to making Q3 at any point all weekend, really. And the 1.5-second deficit Gasly had to in Q2 was relative to George Russell, with the same engine in the back of his works-team car.
But all the while Alpine works on fast-tracking an upgrade to remove a high-speed handling imbalance, it is running constrained. Managing director likened the situation to "carrying an injury".
The hope is for a fix in time for the third round of the season, the Japanese GP, at the end of March. That looks increasingly likely to be followed by a long gap if the Bahrain and Saudi Arabia races are cancelled as is increasingly expected too - potentially offering Alpine further opportunity to remedy that situation.
For now, though, the one point scored by Gasly is a very meek return given Alpine's pre-2026 manoeuvring.
2 Williams
Like Alpine, Williams prioritised 2026 over 2025 very early. Unlike Alpine, it actually got some great results out of 2025. But also unlike Alpine, it is not competitive in the midfield right now.
As Alex Albon said, Williams has ended up in "no-man's land" between the teams fighting for points and the out-and-out backmarkers.
Team principal James Vowles has finally admitted that the majority of its deficit comes from weight, having pointlessly and awkwardly dodged questions about whether the car was heavy in pre-season.
The laptimes and behaviour on track betrayed the real answer. And it's no surprise that Vowles now says there is "a large amount of mass" to lose on the car.
To make matters worse, reliability problems have set Williams back here and there - including in Melbourne, where on Saturday Carlos Sainz completed just one lap.
Williams has time, and a clear route to competitive respectability, but the risk of a wasted season is weighing as heavily after one round as anyone could've predicted.
1 Aston Martin
There was no doomsday start-and-park scenario for Aston Martin and Honda in Australia; on Sunday, Lance Stroll and Fernando Alonso completed a combined 64 laps - comfortably their highest tally of any session all weekend - and Stroll was actually still running at the finish (albeit not classified).
Aston Martin laps completed in Australia
FP1: 3
FP2: 31
FP3: 20
Qualifying: 10
Race: 64
The positives? The countermeasures to mitigate the severe vibrations suffered in testing did work - well enough at least that Aston Martin and Honda were actually quietly confident the cars could have lasted the whole race; and Alonso even improbably ran in the top 10 in the opening laps of the race.
Still, that's about all there is to cling to right now for this sorry superteam.
As Stroll put it, "racing is a strong word" to describe his experience on Sunday. "We circulated."
There is no doubt whatsoever this is F1 2026's pre-eminent crisis team, and Melbourne did nothing to change that impression.
