McLaren has finally shown its hand.
After running a largely blacked-out look during last month’s Barcelona shakedown — part of the wider request for camouflage liveries across the grid — the reigning double world champions have unveiled the MCL40 in full-season colours ahead of pre-season testing in Bahrain.
There’s no great surprise in the palette. The MCL40 sticks with a familiar papaya-and-black scheme that will be instantly readable at speed, even as everything else about 2026 threatens to be unfamiliar. That continuity feels deliberate. When Formula 1 tips into one of the biggest regulation resets it’s ever asked teams to navigate in a single winter — new chassis rules and a new power unit framework arriving together — McLaren’s message, visually at least, is: we’re not reinventing ourselves just because the rulebook has.
The harder part is proving it on track.
McLaren arrives into 2026 as the team everyone wants to knock off its perch. Being defending champions is one thing; staying there when the fundamentals change is another. Big resets have a habit of scrambling pecking orders, not because the “best team” suddenly forgets how to race, but because the areas you’ve mastered under one set of constraints can become far less valuable under the next. The quickest organisations are the ones that recognise that early and resist trying to brute-force yesterday’s strengths into tomorrow’s architecture.
That’s the quiet tension sitting behind the MCL40’s launch: not the livery, but the question of whether McLaren’s title-winning momentum translates when the sport’s technical centre of gravity shifts.
Lando Norris, now the reigning world champion, will carry the number 1 on the nose this season — a small detail that still lands with a bit of punch given how recently it felt like a hypothetical rather than a reality. Norris ending Max Verstappen’s run at the top in a “thrilling battle” for the 2025 crown has already changed the mood around the paddock. It’s one thing to be the quick driver in the quick car; it’s another to be the guy everyone measures themselves against.
And the number matters because the job changes with it. Norris won’t be hunting the benchmark anymore — he is it. Every scruffy Friday, every slightly messy run plan in testing, every hint of an unresolved weakness will get amplified. That’s the price of turning potential into titles, and it’s especially sharp at the start of a regulation era when nobody can fully disguise their uncertainties for long.
McLaren’s Barcelona running — albeit wrapped in camouflage — was an early reminder of how heavily controlled the first public kilometres of a new car tend to be now. Shakedowns are more about systems, correlation and avoiding embarrassment than showing anything meaningful about pace. Bahrain will be the first time the MCL40 exists in the same space as rival cars on representative tyres, with real programmes, and with enough laps for patterns to emerge. Even then, everybody will keep their cards close — but you can’t hide everything when the lap count climbs and the track evolves.
For McLaren, the early storylines are less about raw one-lap speed and more about whether the package looks cohesive: how cleanly it runs through its programme, how predictable it appears on longer stints, and whether the team seems to be learning quickly rather than firefighting. In a new-regulation year, the first teams to establish a stable baseline tend to be the ones that can actually develop aggressively once racing begins.
The MCL40’s reveal doesn’t try to dress any of that up. It’s a straightforward launch: the champions showing up, looking like themselves, and daring the rest to do something about it. There’s a confidence to that — and also a gamble. Because 2026 isn’t the kind of season where reputation keeps you safe. It’s the kind where the stopwatch has no memory.
Bahrain testing will bring the first real clues. Until then, McLaren’s car looks like a McLaren, Norris has a 1 on the front, and the rest of the grid is waiting to find out whether the new era begins with the old champions still in command — or merely hoping they are.
