F1 Has a McLaren Problem. Baku Exposed The Weakness Nobody Can Hide On A Straight

McLaren left Baku with zero points, and the most damning line of the weekend came from inside the garage. "We made life too difficult for our drivers today," team principal Andrea Stella said afterwards, and he wasn't talking about a strategy call.

It was McLaren's third scoreless race of 2026, after China and Canada. It's also the first time since 2023 that the team has gone three Grands Prix in one season without a single point. For a team that turned up in Azerbaijan on a run of two wins in four races, that's a strange sentence to write.

A quick car with one slow habit

Nothing looked broken on Friday or Saturday. Oscar Piastri qualified third, missing a front-row start by a thousandth of a second, and Lando Norris lined up fifth. But Norris sounded like a man describing a different car. He said his was a long way off on the straights, and that at a circuit made mostly of straights it was going to limit everything.

Stella agreed. McLaren lost time to Mercedes on the straights in every practice session and again in qualifying, despite running the same engine. Same power unit, different result.

Piastri ran second early and kept Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar behind him, which was quite an achievement given what his car was missing. Norris climbed to fourth on the opening laps, then watched three cars sail past on the straights and dropped to seventh.

Why it costs more than lap time

A straight-line deficit does something a stopwatch doesn't show. Once a rival gets a tow, your driver knows he can't defend on the next straight, so he has to defend at the corner before it. He brakes later than he wants to. He checks his mirrors when he should be looking at the braking board.

Stella more or less said exactly that. The car couldn't stay ahead on the straights, he explained, so both drivers spent the afternoon under pressure and watching what was behind them. That's the context for Piastri's lock-up at Turn 1 on the restart, when he was third with a podium in reach. He slid through the run-off on flat-spotted tyres, dropped to 15th and clawed back to 14th.

Sky's Jacques Villeneuve pointed the finger at Piastri, saying he was too busy defending against Hadjar to find his braking point. Fair criticism. But Stella took a share of the responsibility for the team, and he's the one who can see the data.

Norris, meanwhile, never got that far. He was taken out at the same restart when Alpine's Franco Colapinto and Pierre Gasly collided, and he lost some of the freshly introduced upgrade parts in the barrier.

The comfortable reading and the uncomfortable one

There's a comfortable way to read all this. Stella said the new upgrades delivered what McLaren expected and that Baku, with its long flat-out sections, simply masked the gain. The team frames the circuit as an outlier, and on the evidence of a single weekend that's a reasonable position.

The uncomfortable reading is that a weakness which shows up this loudly will be found by rivals every time the calendar offers a long straight. The next stop is Malaysia, where Sepang has plenty of its own. Red Bull, who left Baku with a double podium, now sit fourth in the constructors' standings on 263 points, only 43 behind McLaren's 306 in third.

That's not a comfortable gap for a team with title ambitions. Ferrari took 20 points out of Baku while McLaren took none.

Every championship contender has to be good almost everywhere. The best ones are good everywhere. McLaren has spent 2026 looking like one of the fastest cars on the grid until a track asks it to go in a straight line for a long time.

So how many circuits can a contender write off as a one-off before the label stops being believable?