McLaren is going into 2026 behaving less like a team with a shiny new toy and more like one that’s trying not to lose the instruction manual.
With Formula 1’s overhaul landing all at once — new power units, new chassis rules, a very different operating window — the reigning world champions aren’t planning to arrive in Melbourne with a car that’s already been through a rapid-fire cycle of early upgrades. The message from Woking is that the first specification of the MCL40 will largely be the one it races in Australia, because the priority isn’t adding parts; it’s learning what they’ve actually built.
That mindset is also written into McLaren’s testing plan. Rather than banking every possible lap from the first minute of the Barcelona pre-season running, the team intends to sacrifice at least day one as it continues development right up to the deadline. The MCL40 is due to be flown in from AVL in Austria after dyno work on the engine and gearbox, meaning its first track appearance is expected on the second or third day of the Barcelona shakedown.
It’s a choice that will raise eyebrows in a paddock conditioned to treat early mileage like oxygen — but McLaren is framing it as a calculated trade. Team principal Andrea Stella’s view is that some rivals may have “committed” earlier, getting their cars on the ground sooner, but potentially locking in concepts before they’d really like to. In other words: you can be first, or you can be right.
In Stella’s telling, pushing timing “to the limit” is about launching the season with the most competitive baseline package possible, rather than bringing something conservative simply to start turning laps. He doesn’t deny there will be updates between Barcelona and Melbourne — he expects that from everyone — but McLaren’s emphasis is on maximising the initial configuration before the stopwatch starts to matter.
The other half of the argument is internal. Rob Marshall, now central to the technical direction at McLaren, has been blunt that the MCL40 is not the sort of car you want to start “improving” before you’ve even understood its behaviour. The car is, in his words, “very complicated” and “all new”, with lots to “dial in and tune in”. Bolt on new bits too early and you can end up chasing interactions you don’t understand, mistaking correlation for causation — the sort of trap that swallows winter optimism whole.
It’s an intriguingly cautious stance for a team that enters this rules reset with the biggest target on its back. The 2026 form book is expected to be flimsy at best; with limited real-world data and teams leaning heavily on simulation, the scope for someone to land a concept that forces everyone else into panic development is real. McLaren, though, is effectively betting that the first month of the season won’t be won by who panics fastest.
That already puts it at odds with the tone coming out of Maranello. Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur has described an approach that sounds more like traditional pre-season pragmatism: arrive with a ‘Spec A’ car, focus on mileage, validate reliability and core technical choices, then chase performance. He’s even suggested most of the grid will do something similar, because the first test is about understanding what you need to react to — and reacting before it’s too late.
McLaren’s response is basically: we’d rather not need to react at all.
There are, of course, technical tells beginning to seep out. Pre-testing renders of the MCL40 point toward a pushrod front suspension, a departure from the pullrod layout used on last year’s MCL39. Mark Temple, McLaren’s technical director for performance, has played down the idea that this represents some new mechanical headache. In his view it’s mainly an aero choice: suspension architecture is ultimately there to serve the front wing and front-end airflow, and with the 2026 front wings being entirely new, teams are organising their hardware accordingly. Mechanically, he says, either concept is “quite easy” to execute.
What’s more revealing is the admission of how much is still unknown. Temple offered a striking example: even something as fundamental as the “correct” rake — the attitude of the car relative to the track — isn’t settled yet. The previous era (pre-2022) made high rake a familiar visual signature. The ground-effect period that followed pushed cars lower and made ride height sensitivity a defining feature. For 2026, Temple suggests the sweet spot is neither of those worlds, and not neatly between them either.
That matters because it hints at a broader theme: car set-up might become a more useful handling tool again, rather than a narrow exercise in staying within a tiny aero window without losing load. Temple expects a bit more freedom to manipulate car attitude to influence balance “without just simply making the car go slower” — which is exactly the kind of sentence engineers deliver when they’re excited and slightly terrified.
And then there’s the power unit side of the equation, which Temple flagged as a fresh layer of complexity in how the car will feel to drive. The energy harvest and recovery behaviour in braking zones and into corners, he says, creates challenges the sport hasn’t really dealt with in either of the last two design generations — and McLaren doesn’t yet know what the drivers will ultimately need from the handling to exploit it. That, more than any shiny new part, is why understanding is the obsession.
So yes, McLaren turning up late in Barcelona looks counterintuitive. But there’s a coherent logic to it: in a year when the fastest teams will be the ones who learn quickest, Woking is trying to arrive at the first lesson with the best possible textbook — even if it means missing roll call on day one.
