Winners and losers from F1 2026's Australian GP

The first race of the 2026 Formula 1 season featured plenty of entertainment - from the return of reliability dramas to a genuine fight for the lead.

Here are our picks for the key winners and losers from the race.

Loser - McLaren (5th/DNS)

What a comedown. One car wrecked before it even got to the grid, with the horribly painful context of what it meant for the home crowd. The other one just slow (and it ate its tyres).

A successful title defence across a massive rule change that others could get a bit of a headstart on while McLaren was still scrapping to the finish with Red Bull was always a big ask. McLaren has only just ended the long title drought that began when it had that the equivalent situation across 2008 into '09.

This isn't disaster territory for McLaren yet and there are teams in the pitlane in far, far worse positions. But it feels significant that out of F1's 'big four' it's the one that just hasn't looked like a proper threat at any point across pre-season or the Australia weekend. - Matt Beer

Winner - Mercedes (1st/2nd)

The paddock whispers last year were that Mercedes had the 2026 edge. The evidence from the Barcelona shakedown test was that Mercedes could run and run and run and finetune while others were scrabbling. The Bahrain test pace was ominous in places. Qualifying was a dominant 1-2.

It was getting more and more and more obvious that Mercedes was not just the team to beat going into 2026 but had the potential to completely dominate. But 2022 to 2025 had been so painful and so full of false dawns that you still had to wonder.

But now we know. Mercedes is back and this championship is its to lose. - MB

Loser - Ferrari's strategy (not great)

Ferrari may not have anticipated its challenge to Mercedes would sustain not just through the start but all of the opening stint - but it feels like it simply didn't adjust for the new information, or didn't believe in the chances of really beating Mercedes.

In hindsight, its refusal to pit either car during that first virtual safety car period is clearly the wrong decision. Whatever risk there was in rolling the dice with Charles Leclerc or Lewis Hamilton would not have resulted in anything worse than the 3-4 finish Ferrari got.

Of course, Ferrari wasn't to know just how easily it was going to defeat Lando Norris's McLaren and Max Verstappen's Red Bull, that they weren't threats at all, but it should've had a pretty good guess based on that first stint. 

But, while unlucky with the pitlane closing during that second VSC, it had effectively rolled the carpet out for Mercedes to go make hay in clean air. - Valentin Khorounzhiy

Winner - Ferrari's car (3rd and 4th)

We can - we have to, really - quibble with the execution of the race, but it's clear the Ferrari SF-26 as a package had a very, very good day relative to what it had shown 24 hours prior.

The starts are clearly a real weapon - which will be even more beneficial at tracks that skew towards a more conventional racing style.

Beyond that, at the very least this is a clear second-best car behind Mercedes, but it did give Mercedes something to worry about in those early laps - and wasn't terribly outmatched over the race distance in the end.

Antonelli was probably beatable with a conventionally-run race. Russell, I'm not so sure - but Mercedes clearly has a closer rival than everyone had feared. - VK

Loser - Red Bull (6th and DNF)

Max Verstappen's 20th-to-sixth drive is a nice headline, but there's precious little for Red Bull the team to celebrate coming out of this weekend. It's no disaster given the debut of a new powertrain - but Racing Bulls has plainly had a much better weekend relative to expectation.

Isack Hadjar did his job at the start but was waylaid by a failure that had been foreshadowed by a temperature issue and then a "terrible" sound from the engine. Verstappen, of course, had a lot of work to do in clearing the slower cars, but didn't make a huge impression on the race once in a more appropriate track position.

"I think where our pace is lacking is half and half - so half car, half engine. Which is not bad. Those are things that can be overcome. It’s not shocking," he mused. And he is right, of course. But the jaw-dropping miracle start that Red Bull had briefly threatened in testing has not come true here. - VK

Winner - Arvid Lindblad (8th) 

There’s so much new in 2026 that Arvid Lindblad went a bit under the radar in pre-season - and even his impressive eighth place on debut in Melbourne might go the same way amid so much criticism of these new cars.

But he deserves great credit nonetheless for looking like anything but an 18-year-old with just one patchy year of Formula 2 under his belt.

He looks right at home in F1, just as Hadjar did in early 2025 before his stunning rookie season. - Josh Suttill

Loser - Williams (12th/15th)

If you're going to talk a lot about how much emphasis you're placing on hitting the ground running at the start of a new rules era, you can't afford to start that rules era with a backwards limp instead.

Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz's to-do list for Williams was enormous after their point-less midfield finishes. It needs less weight, more downforce, better aero, better reliability. In Albon's words it's a lonely ninth-best - clear of Cadillac and Aston Martin but adrift of everyone else.

That would be disappointing enough just in the context of the ground Williams has regained in recent years since its nadir. In the context of what it billed this season as, how much it has changed and thought it had improved, it's catastrophic. Albon cited the 2022 struggles as evidence Williams can turn things around. But this team wasn't supposed to be about turnarounds and recoveries anymore. The trajectory was supposed to be all forwards into a bright future.

The only consolation is that would have felt even worse if its 2025 development sacrifices had been more costly on track (if it had had an Alpine-like 2025 season, for example - and on that topic, though Alpine is slightly better off than Williams right now, it's not exactly Brawn-ed its way upwards either). - MB

Winner - Gabriel Bortoleto (9th)

This was very, very nearly an Audi entry here - scoring good points in its first race as works team and engine manufacturer, which was not an outcome that felt likely when the project was lurching from one leadership figure to another in the immediate aftermath of its Sauber buyout.

In Gabriel Bortoleto's own words," if someone told me we were going to score points in our first-ever race and be in Q3, man, I would've asked if they were drunk or what".

Nico Hulkenberg being parked up immediately disqualifies Audi from being a true 'winner'. But Bortoleto's feisty drive ensured this goes down as a positive weekend for the debutant manufacturer.

Does it look quite as potent as Bahrain race sims suggested? Not exactly, no. Does it look much better than many had expected before testing? You bet. - VK

Loser - Liam Lawson (13th)

It wasn't Liam Lawson's fault that his car basically didn't move off the grid - and the highlight of his day was probably Franco Colapinto's incredible reactions to just miss him and slew through an impossibly narrow gap rather than slamming into the Racing Bulls.

The optics of finishing 13th when your new rookie team-mate is in the points and has been so attention-grabbing all weekend are not great at all, though. And Lawson would do well not to dwell too much on which rookie had won the Formula 2 race earlier in the day and which junior programme that rookie (Nikola Tsolov) belongs to.

Whether post-Helmut Marko Red Bull F1 world is less trigger-happy on the driver front remains to be seen. Based on past Red Bull precedents, Lawson would be feeling anxious because being upstaged by a newcomer - regardless of the context - was always pretty damning for incumbents under the old regime.

Speaking of which, Lawson slamming Perez ("two years later he’s not over it") over their bit of wheel-banging was a fun sideshow, but if anything, it's Perez whose medium-term F1 future looks brighter right now. - MB

Winner - Ollie Bearman (7th) 

It appears Ollie Bearman has picked up where he left off in 2025 - with a midfield victory to kick off 2026.

He was convincingly the quicker Haas driver, so much so that he’s got team-mate Esteban Ocon worried once again. 

“We damaged the tyres very early on with that, a lot of degradation, and it's flashback to last year, when it was not working well at all,” Ocon said.

“We have two very different cars, myself and Ollie, with two very different issues once again.” - JS