McLaren arrived to 2026 with the sort of glow that usually buys you a little patience: reigning double champions, a freshly crowned world champion in Lando Norris, and a team that last season could turn even messy Saturdays into comfortable Sundays.
Bahrain testing has stripped some of that comfort away.
Norris didn’t try to dress it up when asked what carries over from the previous car’s race-day strength into this clean-sheet ruleset. “From what we see at the minute, no,” he said, before cutting straight to the problem McLaren’s already fighting: it doesn’t have the same baseline pace cushion, and the knock-on effect is tyre life.
Last year, McLaren’s advantage meant it could manage races from the front foot. Norris described it in the simplest terms drivers tend to use when the car is genuinely kind on tyres: you can “almost drive slower”, keep everything in the window, then lean on the pace when it matters. That’s a luxury. Without it, the driver is forced into the kind of push-early, stabilise-later pattern that lights up degradation.
“At the minute, we’re a little bit off,” Norris admitted. “So to match the race pace of some of the others, we have to push a bit more, and then we have more degradation.”
That’s the key line. Over a single lap, you can hide plenty with commitment and a decent power mode. Over a stint, you can’t. If the MCL40 needs to be driven harder just to sit in the same race-pace bracket as its closest rivals, the tyres become the bill that comes due — and it comes due quickly.
The paddock readout from the first of the two Bahrain tests has Ferrari and Mercedes looking particularly sharp, not so much on headline times but on the rhythm of their longer runs. Andrea Stella has already acknowledged he’s been paying attention to what those race simulations suggest, and Norris’ comments give that internal concern a more human voice: the car isn’t yet doing the heavy lifting over a stint, so the driver has to.
That’s also why Norris framed the worklist in broad strokes rather than pointing at one silver bullet. When a new set of chassis and engine regulations lands, teams like to talk about “concepts” — where the performance lives, what the car wants, what it hates. Norris’ view is that McLaren hasn’t found a comfortable operating window yet, and in modern F1 that’s often the difference between a car that’s quick and a car that’s useable.
There was an interesting nod to last year’s machine, too. Norris called it “difficult to understand, but worked well”. That’s a familiar trade-off: an occasionally awkward car that still produces repeatable lap time is worth its weight in trophies. The early impression of the MCL40 is the opposite — less settled, less forgiving, and not yet delivering the sort of Sunday pace McLaren came to rely on.
The consequences are obvious when you put yourself in Norris’ cockpit. If McLaren can’t lean on the tyres and can’t cool them as effectively when it’s forced to push, strategy becomes reactive instead of assertive. You’re no longer dictating pit windows; you’re defending them. You’re no longer holding a rival at arm’s length; you’re watching their undercut become a threat because you can’t extend the stint without losing lap time in clumps.
Norris was careful to say McLaren expects some strengths from 2025 to remain strengths in 2026, but he didn’t pretend that’s enough right now. “There’s still a lot of work just to get the balance in a good window,” he said, outlining a to-do list that covered “every area” — including race pace and tyre cooling — before landing on the blunt summary: “At the minute, we’ve kind of got to improve in most areas.”
For a team that ended last year as the reference, that’s a jarring sentence. But it’s also the sort of honesty you tend to get when a driver knows the stopwatch doesn’t care about reputations, and when the new regulations have genuinely shuffled the deck. The pecking order still looks broadly like a familiar “top four” — McLaren, Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull — yet the margins and the order within that group are now up for grabs.
McLaren’s advantage in 2025 was that it could absorb imperfection: a compromised qualifying, a scruffy first lap, a slightly off balance, and the car would still come alive as the race settled. Norris even admitted how reassuring that used to be — “even when we had a bad qualy, we knew we would have a good Sunday”.
In 2026 testing, that reassurance hasn’t been there. And if McLaren can’t rediscover it quickly, the first few races could become less about converting championship credentials and more about damage limitation while the engineers hunt for a wider, gentler tyre window.
The season starts in Melbourne, with practice beginning on 6 March. McLaren will still travel there as the outfit everyone measures themselves against on paper — but Bahrain has suggested that, on track, Norris might be starting the defence of his crown without the one thing that made last year feel so controllable: margin.
