Andrea Stella didn’t try to play it down: Mercedes has been the early pace-setter of the 2026 build-up, and McLaren can’t afford to treat that as noise.
After the first proper “shakedown week” running at Barcelona, the McLaren team principal admitted the Brackley squad has “definitely raised the bar” — a pointed line, even wrapped in all the usual testing caveats about fuel loads, engine modes and mismatched programmes.
Mercedes emerged with the headline number: 500 laps across its three allotted days at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, split between George Russell and Kimi Antonelli. Mileage isn’t performance, but in an era of tightly constrained preparation time it’s still a form of authority. If you’re running reliably, you’re learning, and if you’re learning quickly you’re usually ahead of the curve.
McLaren’s own tally was 291 laps, logged during its allocated track time. It’s a respectable amount of running, though nowhere near Mercedes’ tour of duty, and it comes with the added weight of expectation: Lando Norris arrives in 2026 as the reigning Drivers’ champion, while McLaren is the team everyone else is now measuring themselves against after back-to-back Constructors’ titles.
And yet Stella was frank about how little anyone can truly “read” from Barcelona. Ten of the 11 teams were present — Williams absent — and the conditions were unhelpfully cold by the standards of a normal F1 weekend. That matters because it distorts tyre behaviour and masks some of the handling traits teams have actually built into these new-generation cars. The temptation in the paddock is always to rank the lap times anyway; the smarter voices tend to look at the shape of the week instead.
From Stella’s perspective, the shape was clear enough: Mercedes looked sharp, while Ferrari and Red Bull also “got off to a good start”. The striking detail, though, was what Stella chose to underline next — not lap time, not even reliability, but the emerging power-unit picture.
“The fact that the three teams I mentioned are equipped with three different power units is a first indication that there may not be extremely marked differences in terms of absolute performance,” Stella said.
In other words: no one has arrived in 2026 with a weaponised engine advantage that makes the rest redundant — at least not among the front-runners we’ve actually seen show their hand so far. That’s significant because it shifts where the early season will be won and lost. If the power units are converging, then the differentiators become the unglamorous bits: how effectively the team wraps the whole package together, how quickly it understands its tyre window in varying conditions, and how cleanly drivers can extract lap time without cooking the rubber.
Stella leaned into that point. More than ever, he argued, this season will reward exploitation and development — and, crucially, development direction. That’s a gentle warning as much as it is analysis. The early phase of a regulation cycle has a habit of lying: a car can look brilliant on Day 3, only to hit a ceiling when the first wave of upgrades doesn’t land, while another looks awkward out of the gate and then rockets forward once its concept is properly understood. Stella’s expectation is that the competitive order in the first half of the season won’t match what we see later, precisely because development gains can be “very significant” right now.
For McLaren, there’s an intriguing tension inside those words. Being champions doesn’t just buy you confidence; it also buys you attention. Rivals aren’t merely chasing lap time — they’re chasing the methods and philosophy that delivered the titles. Stella’s acknowledgement of Mercedes’ early impression reads like respect, but also like a reminder to his own organisation that 2026 won’t be won on last year’s momentum.
Next up, McLaren will roll straight into a filming day on Tuesday, a final chance to validate systems and processes before pre-season testing begins in Bahrain on Wednesday. Oscar Piastri is set for a full day at the wheel on the opening day, with Norris taking over on Thursday, and the pair sharing duties on the final day.
That schedule tells its own story. McLaren has a title defence to manage, but it also has a new landscape to map — one where Mercedes looks energised, Ferrari and Red Bull are already in the conversation, and the early evidence suggests the power-unit spread may not be the get-out-of-jail card anyone was hoping for. If that holds, the margins will be decided the old-fashioned way: by who brings the sharpest car, understands it first, and evolves it fastest.
