McLaren arrived in Miami without the shopping list Ferrari rolled out, and still walked away looking like the team that understands this generation of car best.
Ferrari turned up with 11 new parts – a headline-grabbing haul that included a new floor and revised rear wing – while McLaren and Red Bull logged seven updates apiece. On paper, it read like Maranello had spent Formula 1’s unscheduled spring break throwing the kitchen sink at the SF-26. In practice, the weekend underlined a familiar truth in the current arms race: it’s not how many components you bolt on, it’s how cleanly the package hangs together once the car hits the asphalt.
Miami was the first race back after Bahrain and Saudi Arabia were cancelled, gifting everyone extra factory time. You could see how teams chose to spend it. Ferrari went broad. McLaren went pointed.
All but one of McLaren’s changes were essentially downstream of a completely new floor – the sort of upgrade that doesn’t make for a sexy parts count, but can rewrite the car’s behaviour if it’s right. McLaren described it as delivering “an increase in aerodynamic load and efficiency across all conditions”, and the immediate on-track translation was hard to miss. Norris became the first non-Mercedes driver to take pole this season, and the MCL’s pace looked far less like a circuit-specific spike and more like a step.
The broader competitive picture shifted with it. McLaren not only ended Ferrari’s podium streak, it also outscored Mercedes across the Miami weekend: 48 points to 45. For a season that’s largely been painted in Mercedes silver, that’s a meaningful data point, not a trivia note.
The weekend also carried an echo of McLaren’s recent habit of “winning” development phases. Miami has been kind to them in that regard before: in 2024, upgrades here helped springboard Norris to his first win of that season, and last year both Norris and Oscar Piastri were so comfortable out front that George Russell’s third place came a long way back. There’s a rhythm to McLaren’s progress now – not just bringing parts, but bringing parts that work first time.
Former F1 driver Timo Glock put it bluntly in Germany: the wind-tunnel promise has to appear “one-to-one on the track”, and in his view McLaren has become the benchmark for that conversion rate.
“No matter what new parts they bring to the car, it works,” Glock said. “They understand it immediately, they can immediately translate it into lap time.”
That “immediately” is the key word, because Miami was full of examples of how costly it can be when upgrades don’t land cleanly. More parts can mean more interactions to validate, more set-up complexity, more ways to chase your tail through practice. A floor-centric upgrade, well understood, can be simpler to extract because it alters the platform in a more coherent way. McLaren looked like a team that arrived knowing what it would do, not one hoping it would do something.
And yet, for all that, Mercedes still won the race.
McLaren swept the Sprint with a 1-2, but in the grand prix it was Kimi Antonelli who again had the final word. The Italian took pole on Saturday and controlled Sunday to win by three seconds over Norris, with Piastri completing the podium. The more interesting detail was *how* that margin looked. Earlier rounds have featured the familiar sight of Mercedes edging away once the stint patterns settled. In Miami, Norris stayed close enough for long enough to make Antonelli work.
Glock noted that Antonelli was heard complaining about tyre temperatures – the kind of radio that doesn’t automatically mean trouble, but does suggest a driver being forced to live nearer the limit of the tyre than he’d prefer. By contrast, Norris’s pursuit looked more contained, less ragged. Not slower – just measured.
If that sounds like splitting hairs, it isn’t. When you’re trying to turn “best of the rest” pace into a genuine fight, you need the car to give the driver options: to lean without cooking the tyres, to follow without drifting into a thermal trap, to press without paying for it five laps later. Miami hinted McLaren’s new floor may have shifted them closer to that sweet spot, at least on this track.
None of this means the title picture has flipped. Mercedes still leads the Constructors’ Championship on 180 points, 70 clear of Ferrari and another 16 ahead of McLaren. That’s a cushion built on consistency as much as outright speed, and Miami didn’t erase it.
It did, however, set up a properly intriguing next act. Mercedes brought only two new parts to Miami and is widely expected to arrive in Canada with a bigger package. Glock called Mercedes “one race cycle behind” on upgrades, which is a neat way of saying Miami may have been a weekend where McLaren’s timing beat Mercedes’s calendar. If Brackley’s larger update lands as intended, the hierarchy could snap back into something more familiar.
But Miami also showed the risk for everyone else: if McLaren keeps landing meaningful performance without the messy bedding-in phase, the fight for “closest challenger” could become a fight for wins on merit rather than opportunism. Even Max Verstappen was mentioned by Glock in the context of the field tightening – a reminder that, while the spotlight has been on Mercedes versus its nearest pursuers, Red Bull’s ability to rebound weekend-to-weekend can still scramble the pecking order.
For now, the takeaway from Miami isn’t that Ferrari brought too much, or that McLaren found a magic trick. It’s that McLaren’s development machine looks increasingly like the sharpest in the pit lane: fewer parts, bigger consequence, and – crucially – a car that behaves the way the numbers said it would. In 2026, that’s the rarest upgrade of all.
