McLaren plans to bring 'completely new car' for Miami GP

McLaren will bring an entirely new version of its 2026 car to the North American races starting with the Miami Grand Prix, as it looks to close the gap to Mercedes.

Formula 1's new technical regulations have provided the opportunity for significant developments to be introduced while the rules are still immature, and a five-week gap between races has also given teams time to focus on upgrades. McLaren has always been planning a complete overhaul of its aerodynamics, and team principal Andrea Stella is hopeful it will prove to be a bigger step than that made by its rivals.

“In our intent, there was always the idea to deliver a completely new car – especially from a aerodynamic upgrades point of view – for the North American races,” Stella said. “So we could keep up with this plan. Obviously, the fact that the calendar has been changed sort of helped a little bit, like I'm sure helped all the other teams that could work more streamlined towards upgrading the car rather than being busy with racing.

“But I could say overall that across Miami and Canada, we will see an entirely new MCL40. Again, I would like to stress that this is what I would expect of most of our competitors. So not necessarily is going to be a shift in the pecking order, it will be effectively just a check who has been able to add more performance within the same time frame.

“And we also have some performance to recover if we look at Mercedes, and to some extent Ferrari as well. But we are quite happy with the development that we've been able to manage in the background. So hopefully we should be able to see a slightly more competitive MCL40 in Miami and then in Canada, considering that the last race was already a decent competitive performance in Japan. So we definitely look forward to the next races.”

Stella also says the early deficit to Mercedes from a power unit point of view has already been largely addressed, following close consultation with Mercedes High Performance Powertrains (HPP).

“In terms of working together with HPP and even in terms of developing the simulation tools together with HPP, we have made a significant step forward compared to where we were in Australia," he said. "So I think as a team we are now much more prepared.

“And while at the start of the season a deficit might have existed for the natural consequence of being a customer team when the programming was so pushed – also from a power unit point of view – and that was OK and that was something that we were ready to accept, and we processed very constructively together with HPP. But now later in the season I think we have filled this gap, and we should have all the tools that are required to extract the most out of the power unit.”