Defending champions McLaren are set to bring a “completely new car” across the Miami and Canadian Grands Prix as they look to take the fight to pace-setters Mercedes.
The British team started the year with an underdeveloped car, having last season been drawn into a Drivers’ Championship battle that went all the way to the final race.
That, combined with the necessity to get on top of an all-new power unit from long-time supplier Mercedes, meant they started their ’26 campaign on the back foot, including failing to start the Chinese Grand Prix with either Lando Norris or Oscar Piastri.
However, they made superb progress in understanding their overall package for Japan, where Piastri was in contention for the win before finishing second to Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli.
They have since used the unexpected five-week gap created by the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix not taking place to focus on refining an upgrade package in a bid to take advantage of the huge development potential offered by the new aerodynamic rules.
“In our intent, there was always the idea to deliver a completely new car – especially from an aerodynamic upgrades point of view – for the North American races so we could keep up with this plan,” said Team Principal Andrea Stella, when speaking at a media day at the team’s headquarters in Woking.
“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 [it is] not necessarily 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.
“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.
“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.”
McLaren, who sit third in the Teams’ Championship 89 points behind leaders Mercedes, have made gains with their understanding of the new-for-2026 power units, with Stella hopeful they will be able to extract the maximum going forward.
“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 so I think as a team we are now much more prepared,” added Stella.
“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.”
