McLaren MCL40 revealed as Barcelona shakedown begins

McLaren has revealed the first renders of its 2026 car, the MCL40, as the group pre-season shakedown gets underway in Barcelona.

All 11 teams were allowed to run this week in Spain in order to get initial mileage with their new car designs, offering a chance to identify any significant issues when track running with brand new power unit and aerodynamic regulations. A number of teams launched their cars prior to this week, but defending champion McLaren had not shown off its new design until Monday morning.

Carrying a Mercedes power unit, the MCL40 has been revealed in a special pre-season testing livery for the private shakedown, as the full car branding will only appear at the first official pre-season test in Bahrain in February.

The images released by McLaren appear to show a sidepod design that descends to the floor in front of the front wheels – rather than the full undercut approach seen on some other cars such as the Mercedes and Ferrari – and a large shark fin as part of the engine cover. Details are light around the bargeboards at the front of the floor, however.

Having won both championships last season – marking back-to-back constructors’ titles after also winning it in 2024 – technical director of performance Mark Temple warns there is little crossover from a car perspective.

“It's still a Formula 1 car,” Temple said. “The fundamental principles are still there. The power unit performance, the aerodynamic performance, how well you exploit the tires, those are the primary performance differentiators.

“In terms of whether or not the aerodynamic packages will translate directly from our tools to delivering on track, of course we hope they will, but there are some aspects of the new regulations that make the aerodynamics more complicated. Harder to predict on track.

“Part of that is because we're still relatively early in the regulation cycle. Until we go on track and we see where are the deficiencies between what we predict in our tools and what we observe on track, it's hard to have confidence.

“Of course, a big part of the process in Formula 1 and why we're all quite excited to get on track is because finally we can see where those gaps are, get some certainty around the things that maybe are known unknowns at the moment and then figure out how we incorporate that into our development and our process going forward.”

The MCL40 will not run until Tuesday at the earliest, with the team confirming last week that it did not plan to be on track on the opening day. Ferrari has taken the same approach, with multiple expected to prioritize the later days of track action. Teams can run on any three of the five days this week up until Friday.

Williams has already confirmed it won’t make the test this week, having suffered delays with its new car design passing its final crash test. Mercedes was first to hit the track on Monday morning in Spain, ahead of Audi and Alpine.