2 Years After a Breakthrough Win in Miami, Can McLaren Bounce Back in 2026?

“In our intent there was always the idea to deliver sort of a completely new car, and especially from an aerodynamic upgrades point of view, for the North American races,” says Stella. “So we could keep up with this plan. Obviously, the fact that the calendar has been changed sort of helped a little bit. I'm sure it helped all the other teams that could work more streamlined towards upgrading the car, rather than being busy with racing. But I could say overall that across Miami and Canada, we will see an entirely new MCL40.”

Stella remains coy on what the impact will be, as no one has an idea yet how much new stuff other teams will bring. However, he certainly sounds optimistic about the potential impact. “Again, I would like to stress that this is what I would expect of most of our competitors,” he cautions. “So not necessarily is it going to be a shift in the pecking order, it will be effectively just a check who has been able to add more performance within the same time frame.”

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He suggests that the first priority is to close the gap to the two teams ahead, rather than necessarily being able to jump them. “We also have some performance to recover, if we look at Mercedes and, to some extent, Ferrari as well,” he says. “But we are quite happy with the development that we've been able to manage—so hopefully we should be able to see a slightly more competitive MCL40 in Miami and then in Canada, considering that the last race was already a decent competitive performance in Japan. So we definitely look forward to the next races.”

McLaren has clearly been tripped up by the change of regulations. As Stella pointed out a few weeks ago, one of the issues was the fact that power unit supplier Mercedes HPP had such a head start in understanding the nuances of the rules, allowing the works team to benefit, and leaving McLaren and fellow customers Williams and Alpine to try to catch up. That process is well underway now, and Stella has stressed that HPP has been very supportive.

The bottom line is that the MCL40 is simply not as strong a chassis package as the Mercedes or Ferrari, perhaps impacted by last year’s title fight using up R&D resources, and by McLaren’s World Champion status giving it less wind tunnel time than rivals. Stella could be forgiven for being a little frustrated that the new rule set came when it did, after just one drivers’ title for the team under the old regulations—and has thus made it that much harder for the team to have the sort of consistent run of success enjoyed by Ferrari with Michael Schumacher, Red Bull with Sebastian Vettel, Mercedes with Lewis Hamilton, and Red Bull again with Max Verstappen.

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In his typical glass half-full style, Stella doesn’t want to use that as an excuse. Instead he sees it as a challenge that the team has to tackle. “I would like to emphasize that, and we were reflecting internally on this, we take quite a bit of pride internally at McLaren that we managed to turn things around in a continuity of regulations [to 2025],” he says. “We had kind of less know-how; we needed to generate IP; we needed to generate the solutions to gain a performance and competitive advantage. And since 2023, we managed to do it.”

He adds, “At the same time, while for sure we would have liked to continue with the same regulations, because we were starting from a competitive position, we sort of wanted to test ourselves. We wanted to test our level of maturity, our level of ability to generate new know-how when there's a change, a reset of the regulations. So, while slightly uncomfortable, it's actually a challenge that we welcome. It's a challenge that will give us a measure of where we are effectively as a team.”

He concedes that the process has perhaps been harder than expected. “I have to say that even some of the challenges that we started with, in terms of start of the season, with a little bit of a mixed bag, kind of make the overall test even more probing,” he says. “But—even more interesting. So we are we are enjoying it. We look forward to show on track what we've been able to produce in the ground over this month, especially the last couple of months, I think they've been quite positive in terms of development of the current background.”

As for the coming weekend, it will be an intriguing test of that progress, with the latest rule changes adding a further curve ball. Norris concedes he is as keen as the rest of the world to discover how it all shakes out. “It's obviously a track that we performed very well at as well as a team, not just as drivers, over the past couple of years,” says the reigning champion. “And last year, it was one of our best tracks of the season in terms of pace comparing to others. And it's a different track, and it might still just suit the car a little bit more than some other places. Japan certainly suited the car a little bit more than the first couple races. How it will change things, I don't know. We kind of have to wait and see in some ways.”

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Piastri, meanwhile, downplays the whole power unit discussion, and stresses that the team simply has to make its car quicker. “Mercedes yes, I think they had a better understanding of the power unit and how to get the most out of it,” he says. “But we're clearly still a fair way behind on just downforce and performance from the chassis as well. So I'm sure that gap in the power unit understanding will close a little bit, but our biggest deficit in Japan was not that we were lacking time from the power unit, or how we explored it. It was that our car wasn't as good as theirs. I think that's the bigger piece of the puzzle.”

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