McLaren bets big on 2026 as Red Bull squeezes 2025 to the line: who’s called it right?
The season ended with fists up in Abu Dhabi: papaya vs navy, Lando Norris nursing a title lead while Max Verstappen and Red Bull came on like a freight train. That closing volley set up the question that’ll frame the winter — did McLaren step off 2025 at the right time, or did Red Bull wring something essential from the old regs that’ll carry them into the new era?
Inside Woking, they’re unapologetic. “We made the right decision,” McLaren engineering technical director Neil Houldey said after the finale, reflecting on the call to halt MCL39 development early and pivot hard to 2026.
It’s easy to forget, given the late-season pressure, that the strategy paid off in one rather significant line on the résumé: Norris left Yas Marina as a first-time World Champion in the MCL39. Red Bull, though, had the late-season momentum. Under Laurent Mekies, the team kept feeding upgrades into the RB21 until deep into the run-in — not just for lap time, Mekies has stressed, but to stress-test processes and unlock understanding that might translate under the coming rules. Even he’s admitted there’s a bill to come for that approach, with the possibility they “pay the price” early next year.
McLaren chose the opposite road. Houldey’s case is a simple piece of engineering math. The MCL39 was already grazing its performance ceiling under mature regulations. You’re not finding tenths anymore — you’re finding crumbs. “We were looking for milliseconds,” he said, explaining that a 0.03s gain was a decent update by the end. “The whole car was going to give us a tenth.” In contrast, he says the 2026 car has been picking up those chunks in a matter of weeks in the simulator. If that’s the trade, you don’t waste laps chasing diminishing returns.
Red Bull’s surge, Houldey believes, was as much about operation as it was about raw hardware. “I’m not sure how much has been through their car development…and how much has actually been how they run the car,” he said. In his view, the world champions found new ways to exploit what they already had. The margins in areas like front and rear ride height, he noted, are “tenths” when you get them right, and McLaren felt they were already operating at that level.
There’s a philosophical divide here too. In a rules reset, some teams talk targets. McLaren talks process. Houldey was clear: the priority isn’t hitting a headline number on a slide deck; it’s keeping the development machine sharp — tunnel, CFD, track feedback — and letting the lap time emerge from that cadence. “Keep going, keep pushing each other,” he said. “At the end, you generate the performance that way.”
Of course, you can make all the right calls and still get ambushed by a fresh rulebook. Everyone on the grid is about to roll out an all-new car, and history tells us a few familiar pecking orders will get scrambled. McLaren is betting that front-loading the 2026 project yields a cleaner baseline and quicker understanding. Red Bull is betting that the habits and knowledge honed during its late RB21 push will carry over, even if it costs them a touch of early mileage on the new spec.
The beauty — and the curse — is we won’t know who’s won the argument until rubber meets asphalt. McLaren is among four teams yet to lock in a 2026 launch date, but the wait won’t be long: pre-season running kicks off on January 26 in Barcelona. That’s where we’ll see whether Norris’s title was the end of one story or the beginning of the next, and whether Red Bull’s winter invoice actually lands.
Two teams. Two roads. One set of new rules ready to wreck everybody’s spreadsheets. See you in Spain.
