McLaren believes it has found the way to regain competitiveness in the 2026 Formula 1 season. After Lando Norris’s dominant victory at the Hungarian GP, team principal Andrea Stella revealed that the upgrade package introduced at the Hungaroring represented a change of direction in the development of the MCL40, inspired by the analysis of the cars of their main competitors.
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The novelties debuted in Hungary and helped Norris secure his first pole position and victory in a Grand Prix as the current world champion. Before that, McLaren had been losing ground to Mercedes and Ferrari, as well as being surpassed by Red Bull in the last stages while focusing its efforts on the new aerodynamic package.
According to Stella, the evolution was responsible for the performance leap, although the result exceeded the team’s own expectations. “The improvement in terms of competitiveness can be fully attributed to the updates we brought to Hungary,” he said.
The executive explained that McLaren expected to gain performance but did not imagine it would be enough to secure pole and dominate race pace. Still, he emphasized that the team will need to continue evolving if it wants to consistently fight for wins until the end of the season.
“I still believe that if we want to fight for wins regularly in the future, we need to keep focusing on bringing more updates. That is our plan. But we are not naive. We know that all teams will follow the same path,” he said.
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For Stella, the season has turned into a true race for technical development. “The good news is that McLaren is back in this fight while battling for the lead. I still expect the best car on the grid to find up to half a second of performance in the next 11 races, so there is still a lot of work ahead.”
The team principal also revealed that the new package represents a conceptual change in some areas of the MCL40. According to him, McLaren identified, after putting the car on track and studying the designs of rivals who were ahead, that it needed to change its development direction.
“The updates introduce components that follow a slightly different concept in certain areas of the car. After we put the MCL40 on track and analyzed some solutions present in cars that were faster than ours, we realized we needed to correct the course,” he explained.
Stella concluded by showing confidence in the team’s ability to maintain this evolution. “We know that when McLaren understands the right direction to follow, we can develop the car very efficiently,” he concluded.
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