McLaren have spent the last four seasons doing the hard bit: turning a feel-good revival into a ruthless, repeatable operation. They arrived at the end of the ground-effect cycle not as plucky nostalgia merchants, but as the team that finally wrestled the sport’s centre of gravity away from Red Bull.
And now, just as Lando Norris gets to bolt a ‘1’ on the nose and enjoy the quiet swagger that comes with being reigning champion, Formula 1 has wiped the slate clean.
Zak Brown isn’t pretending the timing is ideal. He’s simply refusing to treat it as a problem.
When Brown spoke in Abu Dhabi, the line that stuck wasn’t about the trophy haul — McLaren’s first championship double since 1998, with Norris edging Max Verstappen by two points and Oscar Piastri doing the heavy Constructors’ lifting. It was the matter-of-fact acceptance that 2026 won’t care about any of it.
“As far as the rule book, that’s the exciting part of Formula 1,” Brown said. “We’ve got to do it all over again.”
That’s the crux of McLaren’s mindset heading into the biggest technical reset the championship has ever thrown at the grid. The new cars are shorter by 20 centimetres, 30kg lighter, and built around active aerodynamics. The power units shift to sustainable fuel and a much heavier electrical component — a 50/50 split between electric and internal combustion. DRS is gone, replaced by an ‘Overtake’ mode tied to proximity in certain zones, while ‘Boost’ can be deployed freely for a hit of extra power.
It’s a redesign of almost every lever teams have been pulling since 2022. And it’s going to expose weaknesses quickly — not just in aero departments, but in how organisations make decisions, spend their cost-cap headroom, and integrate the thousand invisible jobs that decide whether a concept survives contact with reality.
Brown, notably, framed McLaren’s 2025 success less as a technical masterstroke and more as proof the team has learned how to function like a modern front-runner. He talked about leadership structure and the less glamorous departments — finance, HR, commercial, communications, the people who build the scaffolding that allows engineers and race teams to operate at full tilt.
That’s not accidental rhetoric. In a reset year, the temptation is to romanticise the “genius” breakthrough: the clever suspension trick, the aero philosophy that suddenly looks like witchcraft in the first test. But Brown’s argument is that championships in the cost-cap era aren’t won by one dazzling idea so much as by operational bandwidth — the ability to iterate, to pivot when the numbers don’t agree with the wind tunnel, to stay calm when correlation goes sideways.
McLaren’s own recent history backs that up. Brown pointed out the team “changed a lot of our car” even when the rules were relatively stable, because standing still is just another way of moving backwards. That mentality matters in 2026, when every team will arrive with something that looks clever until it doesn’t.
There’s also a sober warning buried in Brown’s optimism: there are no easy points anymore.
“The worst team in Formula 1 is really good,” he said, leaning into a truth the paddock has been muttering for years. Under the cost cap, the old gaps — the minnows in survival mode, the backmarkers shipping seconds because they can’t afford development — have narrowed into something more dangerous. The margins are thin enough that a bad early concept could sink an entire season, and the midfield is strong enough to punish even a top team that stumbles.
For McLaren, the reset carries a particular type of pressure. They won’t be hunted in the old way — nobody’s scared of last year’s floor geometry now — but the expectation changes. When you’ve climbed all the way back to the summit, the story stops being about progress and becomes about defence. Norris in a number-one car is a billboard that says “prove it again”.
The first clues about whether McLaren can translate their momentum into this new era will come quickly. Formula 1’s initial 2026 group test begins on January 26 in Spain, behind closed doors. That’s followed by two Bahrain tests — February 11–13 and February 18–20 — with the cars finally out in the open.
That’s where the early narratives will begin to form, fairly or not. If McLaren look sharp out of the box, the “champions carry over” storyline writes itself. If they don’t, the paddock will start whispering that the reset has yanked away the platform that made them so strong in the closing stages of the ground-effect era.
Brown, though, sounds like someone who welcomes that discomfort. Not because McLaren are guaranteed to land on their feet — nobody is — but because this is the kind of moment that justifies Formula 1’s constant reinvention. The point isn’t to reward yesterday. It’s to test whether you’ve built something that can win tomorrow.
The new season begins in Australia on March 8. Until then, McLaren’s 2025 trophies are safely in the cabinet. Useful, yes. Relevant, only as proof that the team has learned how to fight its way to the front.
In 2026, they’ll find out if they’ve learned how to stay there.
