Zak Brown didn’t arrive in Bahrain pretending McLaren’s recent run of silverware guarantees anything under Formula 1’s new rules. If anything, his message from the paddock was a reminder of how quickly a team’s footing can disappear when the sport hits the reset button — and 2026 is as clean a reset as F1 has offered in years.
McLaren come into the season as the back-to-back constructors’ champions from 2024 and 2025, and as the team that finally ended its long wait for another drivers’ crown when Lando Norris took his first title last year. But with 50 per cent electrification, fully sustainable fuels and active aerodynamics now baked into the regulations, Brown’s tone was closer to cautious realism than victory-lap bravado.
In the team principals’ press conference during pre-season testing, the McLaren CEO pointed the spotlight firmly at two rivals he thinks will be happiest with their winter: Mercedes and Ferrari.
“I think the red guys and the silver guys are looking very strong,” Brown said. “I think we’ve produced a good car. I think we’ll be in the big four. I don’t think we’re at the front of the big four, but it’s going to be a long season with a lot of development.
“We’re still learning, but I think we are in a good starting position… But I think we’re definitely in the top four.”
The subtext is hard to miss. Under stable regulations, McLaren turned itself into the benchmark by out-developing everyone else — the kind of team that could miss the mark early and then simply overwhelm the competition with upgrade velocity. Under a new formula, the first question becomes far more basic: have you understood what matters? And Brown’s assessment suggests McLaren aren’t yet convinced they’ve nailed that initial read as cleanly as Mercedes and Ferrari.
Mercedes, of course, carries the paddock’s longest shadow when it comes to major power unit rule changes, having “aced” the 2014 shift and set up an era of dominance. Brown didn’t need to spell out why that history matters now — everyone in the pitlane can recite it — but his choice of words in Bahrain will only feed the sense that Brackley have started 2026 with a car and package that immediately looks coherent.
Ferrari, too, has drawn admiring glances in the paddock during the Bahrain running, with Brown placing the SF-26 in the same bracket as Mercedes’ early form. That matters because it’s one thing to look tidy on a low-fuel lap; it’s another to give off the impression of a team that has landed the overall concept.
Then there’s the other name Brown was careful not to write off: Red Bull.
“And I don’t think we’ve seen everything yet at Red Bull,” he warned, while also flagging Max Verstappen as part of the equation. That’s a classic testing-season note of paranoia, but it’s grounded in a truth F1 people live by: the best teams rarely show their hand when the stopwatches don’t count. If McLaren are still “learning”, Brown is basically saying he suspects Red Bull are still hiding.
For McLaren, the interesting part isn’t the mild pessimism about where they’ll start — it’s what Brown chose to emphasise instead. Development. A long season. The expectation that the pecking order won’t simply be set in stone after the first couple of races.
That’s an area where McLaren have built real credibility in recent seasons. Even before they became the team to beat, their trajectory was defined by how sharply they could turn a season around. They began 2023 on the back foot and ended it as the closest challenger to a dominant Red Bull once a substantial mid-season upgrade landed. A year later, another major step at Miami was the moment the balance of power properly flipped, with McLaren retaining the pace edge through the remainder of the ground-effect era.
The danger, of course, is assuming that muscle memory automatically translates into the new era. Development isn’t just about rate of parts; it’s about rate of understanding. If Mercedes and Ferrari have started 2026 with a cleaner concept — the sort of car that responds predictably to change — then being “great at upgrades” becomes harder, not easier, because you’re chasing a moving target while the leaders refine something that already works.
Still, McLaren’s line-up provides them with a stable base to interpret what the car is doing. Norris and Oscar Piastri will continue together in 2026, giving the team continuity at a time when the technical landscape is anything but stable. Brown didn’t lean on that in Bahrain, but it’s part of why he can talk about being in a “good starting position” even while conceding they may not be quickest right now.
Testing talk is always laced with theatre, and Brown’s job is to manage expectations as much as it is to project confidence. Yet his Bahrain briefing landed with a clarity you don’t always get at this time of year: McLaren think they’ve built a solid car, but they don’t think they’ve built *the* car — and they’re preparing for a season in which the early headlines might belong to Mercedes and Ferrari, while Red Bull remain the ever-present threat of a team that’s kept something in reserve.
If 2026 is going to do what big regulation changes usually do — shake the order, then reward the teams that learn fastest — Brown sounds like he’s already braced for the first part. Now McLaren have to prove they can still win the second.
