McLaren didn’t need Max Verstappen’s Miami uptick to tell them Red Bull had tried something left-field — the paddock’s eyes had already been dragged to the RB’s new sidepods the moment the covers came off. But the way Verstappen suddenly looked like he’d rejoined the front-row conversation has given the concept extra weight, and Andrea Stella isn’t pretending otherwise.
Red Bull arrived in Florida with a chunky package — seven new parts — yet it was the sidepod work that did the talking. The upper surface has been re-profiled into a shape that’s nothing like the broadly similar “safe” solutions being iterated elsewhere, with a pronounced ducting feature that’s clearly meant to control airflow, create load and manage temperatures in one sweep. In a year where everyone is still learning what the new overbody-aero era really wants from a car, it’s exactly the sort of geometry that forces rivals to stop, zoom in and ask uncomfortable questions.
“For those who are technically interested, we are in a very, very interesting phase,” Stella said in Miami, and he wasn’t selling theatre. “If you see the sidepod concept that Red Bull introduced, it is quite different to the sidepod concept that, for instance, Mercedes and Ferrari have adopted, and the McLaren style is further different.
“I think there will be a stabilisation at some stage, a convergence, but we look like we are quite far from this convergence.”
That’s the key point: in 2026, copying isn’t an admission of defeat — it’s basic survival. Everyone expects a convergence once enough lap time, CFD correlation and wind tunnel truth has piled up. The only debate is when. Stella’s view is that we’re nowhere near that moment, which makes the early-season weeks a kind of rolling design summit: teams watching each other, lifting ideas, stress-testing their own assumptions and figuring out which “clever” interpretation is genuinely fast and which is just clever.
McLaren, Stella admitted, will be doing exactly what you’d expect: poring over what Red Bull has done and trying to understand where the gains might be coming from.
“Certainly each team will be testing, taking a look at the Red Bull concept to see the advantages,” he said. “They have been quite smart and innovative in the way they have used some legality concessions to introduce such geometry.
“I think the overall designs of the cars are far from converging.”
That last line matters because it hints at how volatile this season could stay. In the final years of the ground-effect regulations, the field ended up with cars that looked increasingly related — not identical, but unmistakably in the same family. Stella is effectively saying the opposite is true right now: the solutions are still divergent enough that a single upgrade can reshuffle the order, or at least threaten to.
Miami offered a neat snapshot of that instability.
Red Bull’s step was obvious on Saturday. Verstappen qualified second — his best grid slot of the season — and was just 0.16s away from pole-sitter Kimi Antonelli. Before that, Verstappen’s best qualifying deficit had been around eight tenths, which tells its own story about how significant any closing move is in this era of tight margins and steep development curves.
McLaren also turned up with seven new parts and had their own headline moment, locking out the Sprint 1-2. Yet by the time the main qualifying session rolled around, the same car that had looked so sharp earlier could only manage fourth on the grid — a swing Stella pinned not on magical car transformations but on the more mundane reality of modern F1: hitting the window, nailing the lap, adapting quicker than the next guy.
“Over a single lap, execution is important,” Stella said. “We saw McLaren prevailing in the Sprint quali, but kind of the same car was P4 on the grid in the quali. And I think this has to do very much with execution, optimisation and adaptation.”
That’s also where Stella’s assessment of the pecking order lands with a thud for anyone hoping Miami marked a full-on power shift. Yes, McLaren, Ferrari and Red Bull have “closed the gap”, in his words — but he still believes Mercedes retains a couple of tenths in hand when it counts.
“I think Mercedes, they still possesses a couple of tenths advantage on anybody else,” Stella said. “This was the most noticeable in the race and [grand prix] quali. In the first Sprint section of the weekend for some reason, Mercedes, they didn’t express their full potential… But in reality, it was just Mercedes not optimising their potential.”
In other words: the weekend looked like it had turned into a four-team brawl partly because Mercedes left time on the table at the start. Once they tidied things up, the underlying pace advantage reasserted itself — and Antonelli converting pole into a grand prix win, with the McLarens second and third, only reinforced that reading.
Still, Stella didn’t make excuses for McLaren’s Sunday. If anything, he sounded more annoyed at the missed opportunity than impressed with the result. He reckons McLaren’s tyre consistency — a familiar trait from last year, he noted — remains a strength, but raw pace is where Mercedes has them.
“In the race, if anything, McLaren seemed to have retained from last year the characteristic of being consistent on the tyres… while the main advantage of Mercedes on us is pure pace,” he said. “The car is just a couple of times faster than our car.
“And while we have had a very positive weekend, I think in the race, we might have lost the possibility to win it again for a matter of execution and optimisation of what was available… perhaps if we had kept Lando in the lead, we could’ve led it to the finish.”
That’s the real Miami takeaway for McLaren: not that Red Bull has reinvented the sidepod and everyone should panic — but that the front is now close enough for the small stuff to decide big prizes. When the quickest car isn’t always the one that wins every session, the margins move to preparation, procedure and how ruthlessly a team extracts what’s already there.
And in that environment, a radical Red Bull sidepod isn’t just an interesting photograph. It’s a reminder that, in 2026, the fastest idea might still be hiding in plain sight — and the only sin is being too proud to go and look for it.
