McLaren will be a no-show when the first day of Formula 1’s 2026 pre-season shakedown begins in Barcelona on January 26 — and Andrea Stella is unapologetic about it.
While the paddock’s itching to get a first proper read on the all-new generation of cars, McLaren has confirmed its MCL40 won’t leave the pitlane on day one of the behind-closed-doors running at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. Instead, the reigning world champions intend to begin on “day two or day three”, using the regulations to their advantage.
The Barcelona window runs from January 26 to 30, but it’s not a conventional five-day test. Teams are permitted unlimited mileage during the scheduled hours across three days of their choosing, and those days don’t have to be consecutive. A “day” only counts once a car crosses the pit exit line. In other words: it’s designed to be flexible, and McLaren is leaning into that flexibility rather than chasing the optics of being first out.
“We will not be testing in day one,” Stella said during a pre-season briefing at the McLaren Technology Centre. “We wanted to give ourselves as much time as possible for development. You are allowed to test three days over the five that are available in Barcelona. We will start from either day two or day three and we will test for three days.”
The logic is less about secrecy — everyone will be squinting at the same blurred trackside shots eventually — and more about resource triage in a winter where everything has been ripped up at once. The 2026 rules reset is one of those rare moments when you’re not just learning a new car; you’re learning new operating habits. In that context, McLaren’s decision reads like a team prioritising what it believes will matter most once the stopwatch starts to shape reputations.
Stella was clear this wasn’t a scramble triggered by delays, nor a panicked reaction to an unfinished build. He framed it as the plan all along: maximise development time, accept you’ll miss a day of track reassurance, and arrive with a more mature package.
“This was always going to be Plan A,” he said. “There’s also so much of a change that we don’t need to be necessarily the first on track. So we wanted to give as much time as possible for development, because every day of development, every day of design, was adding a little bit of performance.”
It’s a classic early-cycle trade-off, and Stella didn’t pretend otherwise. There’s comfort in being first: the chance to validate the basics, find the gremlins, and get the inevitable “what on earth is that?” moments out of the way. But the hidden cost is that you’ve effectively frozen elements of the car earlier — committing to designs sooner, signing off parts earlier, and, potentially, leaving performance on the drawing board.
Stella even hinted that teams already conducting early shakedowns via filming days — Cadillac, Audi, Racing Bulls and Alpine among them — may be paying that price in the opening phase of the season.
“If you are early on track, you will have the reassurance of knowing what you need to know as soon as possible,” he said. “But at the same time, it means that you might have committed to the design and the realisation of the car relatively early, so you will have a compromise against development time and ultimate performance.
“Obviously, there will be updates pretty much… for every car between testing in Barcelona and the first race but we thought that, in the economy of a season, it was important to start and launch the car in the most competitive package and configuration.”
That “economy of a season” line is telling. McLaren’s 2025 campaign — where it held enough of a pace cushion early on to switch resources to 2026 relatively quickly — has clearly shaped the way it’s approaching this winter. It’s acting like a team that’s already lived the upside of getting a head start on a new era, and doesn’t see much value in winning the first hour of the first day of pre-season running.
There’s also an unusually candid appreciation from Stella of how violent this transition has been internally. He described the last 20 months as the biggest design effort he’s been part of, not simply because of the rule changes themselves, but because of the volume of redesign required.
“There’s been so much work behind the design, the realisation, the build of the 2026 cars that, for me, is almost unprecedented,” he said. “Not only in terms of the changes themselves, because I think never before there’s been such a huge and simultaneous change of chassis, power unit and tyres.
“This all makes it extremely interesting to see how the cars will perform, how the competitiveness order will be somehow mixed up. We are champions, but we don’t carry being champions into 2026 – everyone will start from the starting blocks.”
That’s not just a motivational mantra; it’s a reminder of the structural reality of a regulation reset. The details that decide the pecking order won’t be last year’s strengths or old habits — they’ll be how quickly teams understand new systems, how robust their integration is, and how cleanly they can evolve once the first baseline is established.
McLaren insists its programme is where it needs to be. Stella confirmed the car has been built and is currently at AVL in Graz, Austria, for dyno running and system sign-off before heading straight to Barcelona.
“It’s been built. The car is now in AVL in Austria to run at the dyno,” he said. “I think this is common practice now in Formula 1… AVL is a facility that we have used for some time, and that’s where the car is at the moment, and then the car will be in Barcelona for the shakedown on track. This will happen directly at the test.”
So McLaren won’t be first out of the blocks in Spain. But if Stella’s right — if the extra days of design time really are worth more than the early mileage — it might be one of those decisions that looks quiet now and obvious later. In a year when nobody carries anything into January except ambition and anxiety, the champions are betting they can afford to wait.
