McLaren’s place in the 2026 Formula 1 pecking order just two races before the season’s summer shutdown pales in comparison to its monster 2025 campaign.It has gone from possessing the championship’s benchmark car to being only fourth fastest at times this year, bringing up the rear of the grid’s front-runners. It has been demoted by teams it beat comfortably last season: Mercedes and Ferrari.McLaren’s drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were clearly frustrated across the British Grand Prix weekend last time out. Norris went as far as to say after the race that the MCL40 is “not a nice car to drive” and “maybe one of the hardest cars I’ve ever driven in F1”.It’s a peculiar situation. McLaren had a 1-2 in the sprint race and then a double podium finish in Miami in May, where it brought in a notable upgrade package. So how does a team drop back to being fourth-fastest just five races later?The simple answer is the ongoing upgrade battle unfolding between the big F1 operations.Since the season’s start in March, Ferrari has led the car-development war, with regular major upgrades closing the gap to Mercedes, which came sprinting out of the gates and has won all but two of this year’s first nine grands prix. Those other two were won by Ferrari.Andrea Stella, McLaren’s team principal, reckons his squad is a few months behind on the development of its 2026 car.Chances of securing a third consecutive constructors’ championship look slim, with Mercedes holding a 154-point lead over McLaren heading into the Belgian GP this weekend, and its hope of a turnaround won’t start until next week in Hungary — the last race before F1’s summer break. This is when another major upgrade package is expected to be added to the MCL40.Two problems have landed McLaren in this position. It learned the cost of developing its 2025 car deep into last season – at the end of the ground-effect regulation era – as it battled the Red Bull of Max Verstappen. And it has made design missteps with its 2026 version that it’s working to correct.Last October, McLaren won a 10th constructors’ title with its bold car design and strong driver lineup in Norris and Piastri. It had gone from fielding one of the slowest cars in 2023 to being seemingly untouchable early in 2025, before Verstappen and Red Bull surged to become a late threat in the drivers’ championship.McLaren reacted by continuing to deploy design resources towards its 2025 challenger, while other teams had switched a majority, if not all, of their focus to producing their 2026 cars, considering the major technical regulation overhaul for this year. It paid off, as Norris sealed the 2025 drivers’ title to give McLaren its first world championship double since 1998.“I would say that having been in the championship so tight with Red Bull, and Verstappen in particular, (we) needed some of our attention in terms of keeping working on the car,” Stella said at Silverstone two weeks ago.“Even if we didn’t bring big upgrades, we definitely needed to keep paying attention, from a technical point of view, on the MCL39 because we needed to make sure that we maximized our performance race by race, because the challenge from Verstappen was becoming more and more material.”Lando Norris after winning the 2025 F1 world title for McLaren at that season’s Abu Dhabi GP (Clive Mason/Getty Images)When it came to the 2026 design regulations — where nearly every aspect of the cars evolved, leading teams to start with a blank sheet of paper — McLaren has realized its initial aerodynamic concept needed “redirecting”.This is not uncommon at the start of a new-rules era, where a rapid rate of in-season tweaking takes place as teams come to understand more about the regulations once the cars begin competing. “This, like everything from an aerodynamic point of view, is not something that you can get to converge in the space of a week,” Stella said. “It normally takes one or two months.”Stella feels that those two elements — the resources spent late in 2025 and the early concept work this year — explain why McLaren is in its current position of being out-developed by its rivals. “We see that the space between which we see upgrades from the top teams is probably two, three months,” he said.During the Austrian GP weekend in late June, Stella revealed some details about McLaren’s planned upgrades. He said, “they are more in relation to the fundamental way in which the car interacts with aero and the aerodynamic flow structure, and the way we generate downforce”.McLaren has a draggy car that also lacks downforce, particularly compared to Mercedes. Stella described the margins between the two teams as between three- and four-tenths of a second, with this mainly showing up in the corners. He described it as “probably 70 percent in the corners and 30 percent in the straights”.Stella does feel that McLaren has a clearer development direction now, and Hungary’s upgrades will mark “the first results of this approach”.But there’s another factor in why McLaren is struggling compared to Mercedes, which supplies it with engines.There’s an obvious speed difference between the two teams, which McLaren believes comes down to how it exploits the engine’s power (split nearly 50/50 between internal combustion power and electrical energy) differently.It wasn’t until the Belgian race weekend that McLaren has received Mercedes’ updated engine. This was introduced to improve reliability — something that impacted the team severely at the start of the season.In Sunday’s race, Norris will take a 10-place grid drop from wherever he qualifies, for taking a fourth engine power electronics unit, exceeding the permitted limit for a whole season. This component is essentially the brain of a hybrid engine, specifically on its electrical systems.McLaren has detailed what happened to his previous three, including how the first endured “a terminal issue in China”, where a similar situation on Piastri’s car meant neither McLaren was able to start the main race there in Shanghai.A second power electronics unit was fitted to Norris’ car for the next race in Japan, but this subsequently needed “remedial work after suffering issues” in practice and later suffered a terminal fault during the second practice session at Monaco last month.As for the third, which Norris had been using since the Miami weekend, McLaren said while it “has worked reliably, Mercedes-AMG High Performance Powertrains has since introduced a series of reliability fixes to their new power electronics systems”.McLaren has chosen to take Norris’ penalty hit at Spa, as overtaking has traditionally been easier here compared to the following two races in Hungary and the Netherlands.McLaren team principal Andrea Stella at the 2026 Canadian GP (Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images)Looking at McLaren’s season situation with a 10,000-foot view, it’s not yet reaching a crisis point, this is just an unpleasant period.McLaren has been known for its aggressive in-season development in recent years, something Piastri noted in Belgium on Thursday. “We’ve shown previously what we can do with upgrades,” he said. “I think this year the teams around us have clearly taken a big step forward in the rate of development.”Because there’s no ignoring the steps Mercedes and Ferrari have taken compared to McLaren since the early phase of the season.The team doesn’t expect those Hungary upgrades to suddenly launch it into the victory mix once again, either. As Piastri said, “I hope that the next few upgrades close the gap, but they’re certainly not going to put us comfortably ahead or ahead at all.”It’s simply going to be another step forward on McLaren’s development journey. One that has been very successful in F1’s recent path, as those 2024 and 2025 titles prove.“Clearly, the rest of this season and definitely next year, and then the following years, it’s going to be about developing still,” Piastri said. “We saw (during the last rule set) how quickly things can change, both during the season and from year to year. So, hopefully, we can do that again.”