McLaren’s Double DNS Deepens Crisis as Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri Miss Out

Formula 1 has not seen anything quite like what McLaren endured in Shanghai before lights out on Sunday.



Both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri failed to start the Chinese Grand Prix, each struck by separate and unrelated electrical issues on their respective power units, leaving two of the sport’s fastest cars silent in the garage as the field rolled away without them.



The chaos began around an hour before the start, when McLaren removed the floor from Norris’s car to investigate what the team described as a problem “on the electronics side.”



They announced with some confidence that the issue had been resolved and the car was in “final preparations for the race” — a statement that aged badly within minutes when Norris failed to complete his reconnaissance lap to the grid.



Piastri’s problem arrived even later and in even more painful fashion, with the Australian actually making it to his grid slot before being pushed back to the garage just before the formation lap began.



“We also identified an issue on Oscar’s car, which means we were unable to start the car from the grid,” McLaren confirmed, describing the twin failure as an “extremely unfortunate coincidence” that the team had never experienced in this form before.



It is the second consecutive race Piastri has failed to start, having been pushed off the track during a reconnaissance lap in Melbourne the week before, making his 2026 season total a stunning zero racing laps completed across two rounds.



For a driver widely considered one of the two or three best on the grid, the situation is becoming farcical through absolutely no fault of his own, and the psychological weight of arriving at a third race weekend without having turned a meaningful lap in anger will be considerable.



Norris, meanwhile, is eighth in the drivers’ standings with zero points, watching his title defence dissolve before the season has really begun.



Gabriel Bortoleto’s Audi and Alex Albon’s Williams also failed to make the start for separate reasons, leaving just 18 of 22 cars on the grid — the most chaotic pre-race period in recent Formula 1 memory.



Team principal Andrea Stella called the situation “extremely frustrating and disappointing,” a description that felt almost inadequate given the scale of the commercial, sporting and psychological damage inflicted across a single Sunday morning.



The power unit reliability questions surrounding the new 2026 regulations are not unique to McLaren, but they are concentrating at the worst possible moment for a team that arrived in Australia as the sport’s reigning champions and strong title favourites.



Mercedes, Ferrari and even the struggling Red Bull all managed to put their cars on the grid, making McLaren’s double failure look increasingly like a team-specific issue rather than a broader regulation problem.



With the next race just two weeks away in Japan, McLaren faces an urgent investigation into both failures simultaneously, under the kind of public scrutiny that tends to expose the fault lines within even the most well-resourced operations.



The gap to Russell in the championship is already 25 points for Norris, and in a season where Mercedes looks capable of building leads quickly, the window to recover a title challenge is closing faster than anyone at Woking could have imagined in January.
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