Three races, three wins for Mercedes, but in Japan, Oscar Piastri stuck McLaren's nose where no one expected. The Australian believes the dominance has cracks and that a comeback is possible.
The start of the 2026 season has a clear owner, Mercedes won the three Grands Prix held so far, Kimi Antonelli is on fire and George Russell isn't losing pace. Everything seems to indicate that the star team has recovered their lost throne, however, in the McLaren garage there's a voice that refuses to give up, Oscar Piastri, sent a clear message: Mercedes is beatable.
Piastri passed both Mercedes at the start in Suzuka and led the race for several laps, his pace wasn't enough to hold off Antonelli, who ended up winning by 15 seconds, but the Australian proved something important: When McLaren does everything right, they can get into the fight. "We're not fooling ourselves, we did everything perfect and still lost by 15 seconds. There's a lot of work ahead," Piastri admitted, but then he dropped the message that gives his team hope: "I'm sure we can get there."
Piastri's confidence didn't come from nowhere, McLaren has a recent history of miraculous transformations throughout the season, it's impossible to overlook 2024 where they started as the fourth team on the grid, behind Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes and thanks to an upgrade package introduced in Austria, they won four of six races and took the constructors' championship, in 2025 they repeated the formula, developing the car enough to keep a Max Verstappen who was fighting for everything at bay.
Additionally, he has an advantage that other teams don't: they use the same Mercedes engine as the silver cars, which means they can study the data, understand how to extract performance from the power unit, and apply that knowledge to their own cars. The difference lies in the chassis, aerodynamics, and setup, and that's where the Woking team has proven to be masters at finding lost time.
The numbers support the hope, McLaren's gap to Mercedes in qualifying has been reduced race by race, in Melbourne, Piastri was eight tenths behind Russell and in China, the gap to Antonelli was half a second. Every weekend, the orange McLaren gets closer to Mercedes.
Ferrari is also watching this evolution closely, they were the second fastest in Australia and China, but in Japan they took a step back.
The championship is long, there are 21 races left and technical development will set the course. Mercedes has warned with a devastating start, but McLaren has already shown in the past that misleading beginnings don't define endings, Piastri laid the first stone of the comeback with his performance in Japan and now it's up to the Woking workshop to turn that confidence into new carbon fiber pieces that fly faster than those from Brackley.