Double F1 2026 non-start “difficult to process” for Oscar Piastri

McLaren Formula 1 team boss Andrea Stella says that the double non-start at the Chinese Grand Prix was particularly “difficult to process” for Oscar Piastri. 

Both Piastri and his team mate Lando Norris didn’t take part in the Shanghai race after their cars hit different electrical Mercedes power unit issues.

Stella said it was a “tough moment” for the whole organisation, while insisting that the fact that the PU rather than the team was at fault made it easier to accept and move on.

For Piastri, the pain was doubled by the fact he also failed to start his home race in Melbourne. 

“Yeah, it is a tough moment, that's for sure, if we consider that Oscar has not been able to start a race in this start of the 2026 campaign,” he told media including Crash.net. “That's pretty difficult for Oscar to process.

“But at the same time, and this was testified and witnessed in the conversation with Lando and Oscar after the race, both remain quite positive. 

“I think what we have gone through at McLaren in terms of the journey from 2023 has been such a good journey of developing a culture, a mindset, what we call internally a winner's mindset, just a positive attitude, and which focuses us on what we can control. 

“In this case today, there wasn't much we could have controlled. So we just take any possible learning, and we go again.”

McLaren has resilience to bounce back 

Stella cited the costly late season races last year – when points were lost to a bad strategy call in Qatar and then double disqualifications in Las Vegas – as examples of the way the team has demonstrated the ability to bounce back from disappointments.

“Even looking at last year, when we won the double championship, and I said that publicly, but we definitely said internally, the victory was not in Abu Dhabi,” he noted. “The victory was in Qatar and in Vegas, for the way we withstood the difficulties. That's where you really become a champion. 

“So today, this is part of the same part of the journey, which is the day in which you have to withstand the difficulty, you have to process it, and you have to use it to become even more of a worthwhile champion in the future and gain the qualities to be a champion. 

“That's our mindset, and I've seen it completely at play today with Oscar, with Lando, and with the team.”

He confirmed that drivers and team tried to learn as much as possible by taking the rare opportunity to watch a race as observers.

“Yeah, that was the case,” he said when asked by Crash.net about that process. “So the drivers did it independently. Then for part of the race we were watching the race together with myself, Oscar and Lando. 

“We were making comments on the behaviour of the tyres, and the behaviour of the hard tyres in particular, making comments about power unit characteristics, the racing. What happens when you start to race another car? What's the impact on lap times? How you can re-overtake another car? 

“So all learnings that you can maximise by just being a spectator, but still a spectator that is quite qualified, and kind of know all the background and the information such that you can capitalise still something useful, even if you are in the position where you would never want to be – which is being a spectator rather than a protagonist.”

Stella noted that the missing the opportunity to score points was the costliest aspect of the missing the race, along with the loss of knowledge gained from track mileage.

"The most detrimental aspect of not being able to participate in this race is the points in the championship,” he said. “While at the moment, Mercedes seem to be in their own category, and we are a little closer to Ferrari, we obviously race with the ambition to compete for important results, and we are just losing ground. 

“These points could have been important at the end of the season. So the most important shortcoming of what happened today is not scoring the points. At the same time, it's also quite regrettable and disappointing for our fans and for our partners from a commercial and a technical point of view. So there's obviously several downsides. 

"Every lap is important in 2026. At the same time, I think we are learning quite rapidly, and with what we have learned in Australia, and yesterday in the sprint, we think we are actually in a good position now in terms of especially exploiting the power unit. So definitely more data would have been very useful. But what we regretted the most today is not having the championship points."