If anyone needed a reminder that 2026 is going to be won and lost as much in the planning rooms as on track, Thursday’s pre-season drumbeat provided it. McLaren is effectively choosing to sit out the opening exchanges in Barcelona, Mercedes has rolled the W17 into the daylight, Ferrari’s SF-26 is a day away from launch, and F1’s own broadcast offering is about to go strangely quiet again just when the paddock is at its most revealing.
Start with McLaren, because the headline isn’t just “they’re missing a day” — it’s that they’re comfortable doing it. Andrea Stella has confirmed the team won’t run on day one of the first Barcelona test, and there’s a real possibility McLaren won’t leave the garage until day three of the five-day window (with teams limited to three days of running across January 26–30).
That’s a statement of priorities. In the first winter of a new rules cycle, the early mileage is usually treated like oxygen: precious, non-negotiable, hoarded. If McLaren’s confident enough to delay its programme, it suggests one of two things — either its schedule is so tightly choreographed that the “right” running matters more than the “most” running, or it’s accepting a calculated hit in exchange for something it believes is worth it. Either way, it’s not the sort of decision you take lightly when everyone’s trying to map correlation and spot nasty surprises before the season begins.
The knock-on effect is that Barcelona’s first couple of days just got a little less useful for those trying to read the competitive order from the outside. One fewer front-running car in the mix early on means fewer reference points, fewer accidental comparisons, fewer moments where the paddock’s quietly recalibrating its expectations.
Mercedes, by contrast, is firmly in “look at us” mode — and it needs to be. The W17 has been unveiled, and there’s an edge to the mood around Brackley: this is a team that doesn’t want to spend another season living off vague “potential” while others cash the results. Mercedes has been limited to seven wins across the ground-effect era from 2022 to 2025, which is a statistic that still sounds wrong when you say it out loud.
That context matters because 2026 isn’t just another development year — it’s a reset. And it’s arriving amid the sort of paddock chatter teams never truly control: recent reports have linked Mercedes to claims that some engine manufacturers believe they’ve identified a loophole within the new power unit regulations. Mercedes doesn’t need to say a word for the mere existence of that conversation to shape how rivals interpret everything the team does in public. In F1, suspicion is a currency, and 2026 is already trading heavily in it.
Ferrari is next up in the launch queue with the SF-26 due on Friday, and the word from those close to the story is that it’s a car with a lot of attention on its detail work — not least because Ferrari’s new engine is being talked about as particularly innovative. You can feel the tension in that: innovation is what Ferrari is expected to deliver, but it’s also what tends to amplify scrutiny when results don’t immediately match the promise.
And hovering over all of it is the most human variable Ferrari has: Lewis Hamilton.
Ferrari announced last week that Hamilton will have a new race engineer for 2026, with Riccardo Adami — his engineer in 2025 — moved to a different role inside the organisation. The timing is what makes it land with a thud. Big teams change people around all the time; the best ones do it early enough that the disruption is paid for in winter, not on Sundays. A late switch, right as the sport is flipping into a new technical era, risks taking away the one thing Hamilton will crave as he tries to kickstart a better season: stable, instinctive communication.
Race engineer relationships aren’t built in a meeting room. They’re built in the half-seconds where a driver needs to be understood without explaining, where an engineer knows when to push and when to back off, and where the tone matters as much as the content. Ferrari hasn’t said it can’t work — it can — but it’s undeniably adding a fresh variable at the moment Hamilton can least afford extra variables.
The final piece is the one that’s going to frustrate fans and media alike: visibility. Limited television coverage is expected again at the first Bahrain test next month. Only the final hour of each day (February 11–13) is anticipated to be broadcast live, with full live coverage returning for the second Bahrain test (February 18–20).
That matters more in 2026 than it would in a stable rule set, because testing is when the story first becomes real. It’s when you see ride characteristics, the early reliability gremlins, the first signs of whether a concept is behaving like the CFD promised — and it’s when the paddock starts rewriting its private pecking order. If the public only gets the last hour, they’ll get the polished portion: qualifying sims, headline lap times, teams already steering the narrative. The messy, most informative middle — long runs, setup swings, problem-solving — will largely disappear behind closed doors.
So yes, it’s “only testing”. But this year, the way teams choose to test — or not test — is already telling you what they think they’ve built, what they’re worried about, and how much they’re willing to show. In a new era, those choices can be as revealing as any lap time.
