McLaren left Bahrain with plenty of mileage in the bank, a car that ran through its programme without drama, and a fairly clear-eyed view of where it sits heading into the first race of 2026. The mood inside the team isn’t pessimistic — if anything it’s quietly encouraged — but Andrea Stella isn’t dressing up what the lap charts and long-run rhythms hinted at across the test.
Ferrari and Mercedes, in Stella’s assessment, look like they’ve started this new regulations era with a small but tangible edge.
“Overall, it’s been a positive testing session,” Stella said after the final day of running. For McLaren, the headline is that the MCL40 behaved itself. In a winter where everybody’s learning new systems and chasing integration gremlins, simply getting through the planned items matters more than it sounds on paper.
“Especially here in Bahrain, the car behaved quite reliably. We pretty much signed off all the test items that we had planned from a functionality, from reliability, and from a raceability point of view,” he explained.
That reliability is what allowed McLaren to do the work that actually counts in February: iterating through set-ups, tweaking aero balance, understanding how the tyres react with a brand-new platform — and, crucially for 2026, starting to get on top of power unit operation and deployment. Stella all but underlined that last part as one of the big differentiators still being uncovered across the pitlane.
“It’s all new. Therefore, every run you do, there is something to learn,” he said. “But overall, I think we have added a little bit of performance every single day, just because we were in condition to test and experiment and play with set-up and play with aerodynamic optimisation, tyres, and I would say play also with the exploitation, and the optimisation of the power unit, which is definitely a big ticket item in terms of understanding the competitive order.”
In other words: McLaren believes it has a decent baseline, and it feels like there’s performance left to unlock as it refines how the whole package works together. But Stella doesn’t think that process alone will immediately cover the gap to the pacesetters.
“I would say that this test has confirmed that Ferrari and Mercedes look like the teams to beat,” he said. “I think McLaren is not far [away]. I think it’s good to see that we are part of the top four group. But I think these two teams, they seem to have shown a little bit of an advantage.”
That “top four group” reference matters. Even allowing for the usual testing caveats — fuel loads, engine modes, run plans — the paddock broadly expects the leading quartet to remain the same as last season, at least initially. The more interesting question, and the one Melbourne will start answering, is how those four arrange themselves now that everyone’s effectively rewriting their playbook.
Stella’s take is that Ferrari and Mercedes have come out of the gate cleaner, while McLaren is closer to Red Bull in genuine pace. But he was careful about leaning too hard on any single comparison, even when pointed toward one of the more obvious reference points of the week: a race-simulation overlap between Oscar Piastri and Max Verstappen.
“There is a race simulation… Oscar and Verstappen. It happened at the similar time of the day, and it was a similar pace,” Stella noted. And he’s right that long runs, not low-fuel glory laps, are often where the masks slip the most. You can’t hide tyre degradation forever, and you can’t fake a car that looks calm and repeatable through a stint.
But he also pointed to the big confounding variable Bahrain always brings: track evolution. A run done in the wrong window can look flattering or punishing, and the difference between early-afternoon heat and late-session grip can distort the optics.
“Often the race simulation is actually where you can more accurately see what the genuine performance of cars is,” Stella said, before adding the caution. “Dependent on the time of the day, then the race simulation may be quite a lot faster… difficult.”
His conclusion was blunt enough, though. “I think McLaren and Red Bull probably very similar. Ferrari and Mercedes a step ahead.”
For McLaren, that’s a familiar sort of starting point: close enough to be in the fight, not quite clean enough yet to dictate it. The encouraging part of Stella’s debrief is the emphasis on understanding and exploitation — language that suggests McLaren doesn’t feel it has hit the ceiling of the MCL40, even if others have arrived with a slightly sharper first version.
The danger, of course, is that “not far” can become a frustrating place to live if the front two keep developing at the same rate. And with the season starting in Melbourne, there’s no gentle runway. If Ferrari and Mercedes truly have a head start on the core performance of their cars, McLaren will need to land upgrades with confidence rather than chase set-up miracles weekend to weekend.
Still, in a year where nobody’s fully certain what “normal” looks like, McLaren’s Bahrain readout is at least coherent: a stable platform, steady gains day by day, and a realistic picture of the opposition. The only thing left is the part testing can’t provide — the moment everyone turns the knobs up and the stopwatch stops being theoretical.
