McLaren won’t blink: Stella doubles down on 2026 pivot despite Red Bull’s late-season surge
Andrea Stella isn’t in the mood for second-guessing. While Red Bull has kept turning the development screw on its RB21 to keep Max Verstappen in the title hunt, McLaren’s team boss says there was never going to be a late push for more MCL39 upgrades — not with 2026 looming.
“The 2026 project would be heavily compromised,” Stella said bluntly in Mexico City. “We want to win championships in the future. To win championships in the future, you need to have a competitive car.”
McLaren switched off the tap on MCL39 updates over the summer, a decision that looked bold when the orange car was running hot through the first half of the season — and a little braver once Red Bull’s iterative updates started to bite. Aside from a sharp Mexico weekend, McLaren hasn’t had that same air of inevitability since the break, with Verstappen and the RB21 grinding away at the gap in both pace and points.
Stella’s logic is clear: with one year left of the current regulations, there’s more to gain by getting a head start on 2026 than by chasing diminishing returns in ’25.
“Our car, from an aerodynamic point of view, was already quite mature,” he explained. “We were at a plateau. To add one point of aerodynamic efficiency now takes weeks. With the 2026 car, every week, we add a lot of downforce. That’s where you have to make a call with the best information you have.”
The call is made tougher by the cost cap and the Aerodynamic Testing Restrictions that bite hardest on the teams at the top. “By being the champions, we are the most restricted in wind tunnel and CFD allowance,” Stella said. “It’s not like we have unlimited resources. You need to be on the rate in how you allocate resources this year to next year because it comes from the same point.”
In other words: every CFD run and wind-tunnel hour spent eking a tenth from the MCL39 is one not spent unlocking the 2026 concept. And when you’re managing your manpower, tunnel time and simulation tools as a single, balanced system, the bottleneck appears everywhere at once.
“It’s both,” Stella said when asked where the compromise would land — people or aero tools. “When you work efficiently in F1, you blend manpower with methodologies, CFD and the wind tunnel, so none of them is a single limitation. They become a single limitation at the same time, and that’s what was the case for us.”
If that sounds clinical, the recent on-track story has been anything but. Red Bull’s upgrades have had Verstappen nipping at McLaren’s heels most weekends, and the RB21 has looked less temperamental than it did early doors. Stella believes that’s partly the point: it’s easier to find lap time when you’re fixing something specific than when you’re polishing a car that already works.
“For Red Bull, they talked at times of struggling to rebalance with the front wing when using big rear wings; then it’s easier to find lap time, because you are fixing something rather than trying to improve something that already works well.”
Red Bull isn’t pretending there’s no opportunity cost in this approach. Team boss Laurent Mekies has been open about the trade-off: the upgrades come with a hit to the 2026 project. But, in his view, the data is worth the bill.
“It was, and is, very important that we get to understand if the project has more performance,” Mekies said recently. “Even if the regulations are completely different next year, we will elaborate next year’s project with the same tools, with the same methodology. It’s very important that we validate, with this year’s car, that our way of looking at the data is correct.”
So, Red Bull keeps pushing for performance now to tighten up correlation between simulation and reality, banking confidence for the winter. McLaren, meanwhile, is protecting a head start on the new rules — and trusting that the MCL39’s peak is roughly where it’s going to stay.
Could McLaren have kept one eye on ’25 performance a little longer? Stella doesn’t buy it. “Not at all,” he said when asked if they’d switched off too early. “It’s not like if I spent three weeks more on 2025, I’m gonna add a tenth of lap time. We were just plateaued. To produce the upgrades we took to mid-season was a huge undertaking. We were asking, ‘should we actually finalise?’, because we were struggling to improve what was already a pretty mature project.”
That remark will set off the usual debates — the title fight is tight, and Verstappen’s chase for a fifth consecutive drivers’ crown remains alive — but McLaren’s stance is consistent with a team aiming beyond the next Sunday. When your tunnel hours are capped and your aero curve is flattening, patience becomes performance.
Mexico brought a touch of calm, with Lando Norris reminding everyone the MCL39 can still beat the RB21 on merit. But the direction of travel from Woking is set. McLaren’s chips are on 2026, and Stella isn’t about to reach back into the stack.
