McLaren made ‘aggressive and fundamental’ changes to its title-winning F1 car

Heading into the final year of this set of regulations with the best car of the field, it would have been understandable for McLaren to optimise its winning concept from 2024, the MCL38 that delivered the papaya squad its first world championship since 1998.

Since 1 January teams have been allowed to fully develop their 2026 cars, which will be a challenging clean-slate design, which might invite some teams not to overspend resources on their cars for this season.

But not McLaren, team boss Andrea Stella says as the team first unveiled its 2025 car on a rainy filming day at Silverstone, sporting a temporary camo livery ahead of F1’s big season launch in London next week.

The MCL39 appears substantially different from the sidepod onwards, and that is no coincidence as Stella says the team has made drastic changes to its winning formula to stay ahead of the game.

“What we tried to achieve with this new car is innovative. It’s a car in which we tried to raise the bar in many areas, including the fundamental layout,” Stella promised at the launch event at Silverstone.

Lando Norris, McLaren MCL39

Photo by: McLaren

“It’s something that definitely we evaluated carefully because the MCL38 was already a competitive car, so we needed to be conscious, considerate as to how much we wanted to innovate. But ultimately, we actually went for a relatively challenging approach in terms of how much innovation is in this car. This is predominantly to gain aerodynamic efficiency. At the same time, we still wanted to make some improvements in terms of interaction with the tyres, and what you can do to improve long-run pace.”

“Pretty much every fundamental component of the layout has been subject to some innovation in order to gain, sometimes not only by marginal gains, some technical opportunities for development. Everything has been subject to optimisation, sometimes incrementally, sometimes actually quite substantially.”

Stella explained that McLaren simply could not play it safe because of how tight 2024 has been, with McLaren, Red Bull, Ferrari all closely matched over the balance of the entire season, and – along with Mercedes – all trading dominant weekends. Add to this the fact that the current set of regulations is heading into its fourth year, and teams at the front of the grid have been forced to turn their cars upside down just to find those extra marginal gains.

“We have not changed the approach or the rate of development with a front-loading of our developments,” said Stella, who added that McLaren’s launch car is roughly what we’ll be seeing at the Bahrain pre-season test at the end of the month.

Lando Norris, McLaren MCL39

Photo by: McLaren

“We have just tried to go as fast as possible in terms of developing the car, which means that there will be some updates during the early races of the season, but this would have been the same even without the 2026 changes of regulations looming ahead.

“We are very aware that last season, even if it had been a successful season, the margins we had mean that we had to be aggressive with the car to try and cash in as much performance as possible. Those margins were so small that considering the development that other teams would have had, had we not gone as fast as possible in terms of development, we might very quickly lose any advantage that we had.

“With four teams that at any single weekend were in condition to win the race, it’s very easy to fall from being pole position to being P8 on the grid, so definitely we kept full gas in terms of development, and we will see if we have been able to develop more than our competitors from the 2024 to the 2025 car.”