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McLaren suffered its first setback of 2026 on day two of Formula 1 testing at Barcelona.
Oscar Piastri’s running was ended early on Thursday as McLaren suffered a fuel system issue and opted to strip the car down fully to identify the source of the problem.
Piastri completed just 48 laps, which is only a third of what test benchmark Mercedes has been managing each day.
While not as dramatic a blow as Red Bull’s day-ending shunt late on Tuesday, performance technical director Mark Temple noted “every minute of track time is precious at such an early stage of the season”.
“We've gone out, we've got a good understanding of where the car is from a baseline point of view, but obviously we've had some issues,” Temple said.
“We've not been able to do all the running that we would like.
“We discovered a fuel system problem and the car's very complex so we decided to bring it back into the garage, strip it down fully, understand where the problem is coming from.”
McLaren’s end-of-day test summary noted that some competitors are already setting “a very high bar for performance”, so it knows this puts it behind the curve set by Mercedes.
It comes after a solid opening day on track for the MCL40, which had not completed a shakedown prior to this week.
McLaren delayed its debut to advance the car’s development as much as possible and then to make sure it was properly prepared on-site at Barcelona.
Lando Norris said Tuesday “turned out to be a decent day” and McLaren was “quite happy” with how well the car ran out of the blocks on day one, with chief designer Rob Marshall saying there were “no nasties, no really scary things that went wrong”.
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Norris completed 76 laps, which was solid in the circumstances, although Mercedes managed 183 – and then completed its third and final day of on-track running on Thursday with another 168.
It has brought Mercedes’ to 500 laps in total across the test, which means McLaren would need to rack up almost 400 in a single day on Friday to match it.
However, there are still six full days of testing to come in Bahrain next month, so while it leaves McLaren on the back foot for now, there is plenty of time to work through the more meaningful part of its preparations.
“It's a shakedown,” Temple said.
“One of the most important things is for us to do the running, identify issues, dig into them so we can understand them, solve them and then have better running going into Bahrain and I think that's clearly a big focus for us.”
