McLaren’s season so far has been a strange kind of underwhelming. On paper, 46 points from a possible 144 after three races doesn’t scream “reigning champion”. On the stopwatch, though, it’s not a collapse — it’s a team stuck in that irritating grey zone where the car is broadly fine, the pace is often there, and yet the results look like someone’s been pulling the plug at the worst possible moments.
A double retirement in China after power unit trouble, Oscar Piastri binning it on the formation lap in Australia, and only in Japan did the picture start to resemble anything like normal service: Piastri second to Kimi Antonelli, Lando Norris fifth, and the first proper double points finish of 2026. The MCL40 hasn’t suddenly become a tractor; it’s simply been outgunned by Mercedes — and, depending on the circuit, maybe Ferrari too — while reliability has turned “solid points” into “none at all”.
That’s why Miami matters again.
Two years ago, McLaren arrived there with an upgrade package that didn’t just work — it shifted its entire competitive reality. This time, the team is trying to bottle that same electricity, helped by an unusual quirk of the 2026 calendar: the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix have been cancelled, leaving everyone a rare chunk of uninterrupted development time. McLaren’s had the headspace to push hard, but so has everybody else. The question isn’t whether McLaren will improve; it’s whether it can improve more.
Andrea Stella certainly isn’t underselling what’s coming. In McLaren’s spring debrief, the team principal described the upcoming specification as, effectively, a reset in all but name.
“In our intent, there was always the idea to deliver sort of a completely new car especially from an aerodynamic upgrades point of view for the North American races,” Stella said. “Obviously, the fact that the calendar has been changed helped a little bit… like I’m sure it helped all the other teams.”
The key line followed, and it was delivered without the usual F1 vagueness.
“Across Miami and Canada, we will see an entirely new MCL40.”
That’s an enormous statement in year one of a new rules cycle — and it carries risk as well as promise. Throwing a lot of aero change at a car can just as easily move you sideways as forwards, especially when the baseline is already close enough that correlation errors get punished. But McLaren’s predicament makes the aggressive approach understandable. In Stella’s own framing, this isn’t necessarily about producing a headline-grabbing “we’re back” moment; it’s about clawing back performance that McLaren believes it has left on the table relative to Mercedes and, to a lesser extent, Ferrari.
“Not necessarily is going to be a shift in the pecking order,” he cautioned. “It will be effectively just a check about who has been able to add more performance within the same time frame.”
That’s the real Miami subplot: not a miracle upgrade, but a competitive audit. Everyone’s had the same extra weeks. Everyone’s factories have been busy. When they all roll into the same paddock with fresh floors, revised bodywork and reworked concepts, you get a rare apples-to-apples read on development efficiency — the stuff teams don’t like putting on a spreadsheet in public.
What makes McLaren’s position especially intriguing is the psychological and political weight of 2026. This is the first season of the new technical and engine regulations, and McLaren is doing it as the defending world champion. There’s a temptation in that situation to lean on what worked previously and hope it carries over. Stella’s comments suggest McLaren’s leaning the other way: treating the reset as a kind of internal exam, one it wants to pass loudly.
He admitted the team would have preferred continuity after winning titles, but he also framed the rule change as an opportunity to measure “maturity” — and to prove McLaren can build advantage from scratch, not just iterate once it’s found it.
“We wanted to test ourselves… our level of ability to generate new know-how when there’s a change, a reset of the regulations,” Stella said. “While the slightly uncomfortable is actually a challenge that we welcome… a test to show what we’ve been able to achieve in terms of maturity of the team.”
There’s also a slightly sharper edge underneath that optimism. McLaren can’t afford a season of “nearly” in a year when others — Mercedes most obviously, based on the early pace — have started with cleaner execution. If the MCL40’s early narrative has been unreliability masking respectable speed, there’s only so long that excuse buys you in the championship reality, especially with rivals banking points.
Miami and Canada, then, won’t just be about lap time. They’ll be about whether McLaren’s 2026 project has a clear development direction, and whether the team can turn weeks of uninterrupted work into a car that’s easier to race, easier to qualify, and less prone to those weekends that evaporate before Sunday even begins.
Stella insists the recent run has been “quite positive” on the development side, and Japan offered the first hint that the season doesn’t need rescuing so much as sharpening. But Miami will tell us whether McLaren is polishing a fundamentally strong concept — or trying to out-upgrade a problem it hasn’t fully understood yet.
Either way, the champions are about to show their hand. And in a year of resets, that can define the tone of an entire season.
