McLaren

A team transformed under the stewardship of Zak Brown, McLaren‘s days in the grand prix doldrums appear well and truly behind it. The team scored its first Constructors’ title for over a quarter of a century in 2024, and swiftly doubled up with twin glory last season, with Lando Norris becoming the 11th British driver to lift the Drivers’ world championship, and McLaren’s first since Lewis Hamilton back in 2008.

“It’s been a quite unbelievable turn in form for a team that muddled through for far too long”

It’s a quite unbelievable turnaround in form from a team that muddled through with Honda and Renault power and juggled egos with its own history for far too long. However, while Woking was on top of the world in the last rules cycle, things could change this year as big regulation shifts often tend to favour the full factory teams such as Mercedes and Ferrari. Can McLaren and its two superstar drivers keep pace?

1 Lando Norris Born November 1999, Great Britain Starts 152 Wins 11 / Podiums 44 / Poles 16 Notable achievements 2025 world champion, 2017 FIA F3 champion

81 Oscar Piastri Born April 2001, Australia Starts 70 Wins 9 / Podiums 26 / Poles 6 Notable achievements 2021 FIA F2 champion, 2020 FIA F3 champion

McLaren set out 2026 F1 battlegrounds – they’re just 200mm long

F1’s 2026 regulations severely restrict designers, says McLaren. But the reigning champion has identified small areas where there may be a chance to find the ‘performance honey’. By Mark Hughes

Shortly before the dawn of the new season, McLaren treated us to a debrief of its preparations. It didn’t show us the actual 2026 car at that point, but team principal Andrea Stella, design chief Rob Marshall and technical director of performance Mark Temple were on hand to give some illuminating background.

As the world champion constructor of the last two years, McLaren has arguably better reason than most to view the new 2026 regulations with some trepidation. McLaren managed to crack the code of the ground-effect cars better than anyone as the era progressed, overhauling the initially big advantage of Red Bull and totally eclipsing its power unit supplier Mercedes.

But all that accumulated knowledge has been rendered pretty much obsolete by the clean sheet the new flat bottom/active aero regulations represent. So did the McLaren successes of 2024-25 derive from better facilities, brainpower and processes than the others? In which case it might expect to carry on where it left off despite the regulation change. Or was it simply from a luckier development direction, which took a few years to become more fruitful than the alternatives, but overhauled them in the end?

The Mercedes power unit may very well have a power advantage over the opposition this season – at least initially. If that is true and none of Ferrari, Honda, Red Bull Powertrains or Audi can initially measure up, it defines the identically-powered works Mercedes team as McLaren’s most likely challenger. The packaging of the previous power units was a well-established science, especially given that their specification was frozen for several years. But with hugely bigger batteries, the deletion of the ERS-H and the opportunity for a total redesign, it could be that there is a bigger advantage than before of being a works team which can conceive and develop its power unit and chassis as one.

“Such puzzles present a fascinating anticipation”

The clean-sheet dimensional regs of the active aero cars may just have opened up a window of opportunity, one which not everyone might initially see. That’s the fascination about any dawn of a new regulation set and why such changes have often heralded a change in the established order. If Mercedes, for example, has been able to use its inherent integration advantage to optimise for just such an opportunity, could McLaren be on the back foot?

It’s not something McLaren is dismissing but asked if the chosen route for the new car’s aero platform was unambiguous, Marshall replied: “You kind of think there’s a lot of freedom but when you actually draw it out there’s not that much because there are boxes you have to stay within. The wheelbase is shorter by regulation. The engine is fixed length, your gearbox cluster and driveshafts positioning are fixed, you need a certain amount of fuel in the car and that sets your fuel volume. Now the new energy stores are [bigger]. Then you have a driver volume and his protection and so really you have only 150-200mm of car that you have control over the length of. The front nose is pretty mandated, so you have a bit of bellhousing and some stuff around the pedals you can play with. So there’s not an awful lot of freedom. Hopefully everyone else has come up with the same sort of conclusion. If there’s more freedom we’re not aware of it.

“In terms of packaging the fuel volume is less but the batteries are bigger, the turbo is simpler, making the packaging a bit easier. So some things help, some don’t. But [in terms of] freedom you’re restricted by regulation boxes you can’t control.”

Just like almost all F1 engineers Rob is notoriously reticent to go into too much detail. But it’s interesting he mentions the regulation boxes – because within them, there appears to be a possible opportunity for differences which could be aerodynamically significant: cockpit positioning and front axle line. The rear face of the cockpit has to be between 1830-2030mm from the front of the survival cell, giving a 200mm range of where within the wheelbase to site it. Additionally, the front axle has a 150mm range, again as measured from the front of the tub. So we are not talking about different lengths of car. Just different geometries within the same length.

Why might this be so significant? Because there is another dimensional stipulation – new for these regs – that the top of the nose and the cockpit sides should follow a curvature prescribed by a notional circle with its circumference mid-point mid-cockpit; so with the nose rising up and the top of the chassis falling away all in the same radius. What this means is that the closer you can bring the cockpit and front axle together, the higher your nose can be. Which in turn means the greater mass airflow you can feed to the underfloor.

The complication of that is that the FIA has also mandated in-washing ‘floor boards’ roughly where the pre-’22 barge boards used to be. They are there to take the front wheel wake into the floor. Out-washing is better aerodynamically, in-washing narrows the wake for the following car. Bringing the front wheels and cockpit closer together will give you less opportunity of minimising that in-wash. But where is the optimum trade-off? Might there be a packaging trick which allows full potential to be taken of a higher nose? These are the sort of choices a new formula brings and invariably after a season or two they narrow down to a uniform optimum.

There may be nothing in it, but such puzzles present a fascinating anticipation about where the ’secret honey’ is located and who might have found it. If under a new reg set McLaren, as a customer team, can pick up where it left off, it would be arguably even more impressive than its fight back to the front over the last few years.

McLaren’s big fear: Why factory power could prove crucial in F1’s 2026 reset

With more factory-backed teams than customers and a ruleset that rewards integration, 2026 could mark Formula 1’s return to a manufacturers’ championship

Formula 1 has always oscillated between eras defined by ingenuity and eras defined by industrial might. The 2009 season, in which Brawn GP came out of nowhere and caught everybody by surprise to win both titles, is a perfect example of the former. Mercedes coming out swinging when the rules changed over a decade ago is a prime instance of the latter.

The arrival of the hybrid rules in 2014 meant Mercedes’ extraordinary works integration established an advantage that lasted half a decade and yielded an incredible amount of accolades. Yet, as the grid stabilised and customer teams adopted refined 1.6-litre V6s with fewer idiosyncrasies, the pecking order gradually flattened.

By the end of the 2020s, the championship once again felt like a largely chassis-driven technical landscape with customer teams capable of becoming frontrunners – McLaren’s resurgence being the clearest example.

But 2026 threatens to flip that dynamic back. For the first time in more than a decade, a new rulebook arrives with more works operations than customer outfits, and with regulations that place a premium on tight power unit–aero integration.

Audi enters as a full factory entity, Honda returns not merely as a supplier but as a partner to Aston Martin, and Red Bull Powertrains steps into the fray as the first entirely new power unit operation to be created for F1 since the start of the hybrid era. Add Ferrari and Mercedes, and suddenly half the grid is armed with a factory programme. In a championship where marginal gains often come from the seams between departments, 2026 promises to be the moment where those seams matter more than ever.

The shape of the 2026 technical package – lighter chassis, active aero and greater reliance on electric power – is a rulebook designed to create strategic unpredictability and remove the extreme complexity of current energy management. But the unintended consequence is that chassis teams dependent on a third-party supplier face an uphill task. Every interaction between power unit and aero will become more decisive, and nothing defines a works team more than the ability to design these elements as a single product rather than two separate systems bolted together.

A grid F1 hasn’t had in years

Look at the numbers. In 2014, when the current engine formula launched, F1 had three true works power unit teams: Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault. Honda joined in 2015, but its struggles with McLaren reinforced the difficulty of standing up a modern hybrid powertrain without total organisational alignment. By 2026, the picture is dramatically different.

Ferrari and Mercedes remain at the centre of their own universes; Red Bull’s decision to bring engine building to Milton Keynes in collaboration with Ford gives it a degree of integration unseen for the drinks giant; Honda officially returns with a full factory relationship at Aston Martin; and Audi’s arrival adds a new manufacturing heavyweight with the ambition and budget to match the championship’s most committed operations.

Including Racing Bulls as a direct beneficiary of Red Bull Powertrains’ integration, that gives F1 up to six teams operating within a factory-led ecosystem. It means customer teams will be in the minority at precisely the moment when being a customer matters most. The last time F1 experienced a comparable split was the late 2000s, but that was an era of more conventional engines and far less reliance on the synchronisation of energy recovery, aero map switching and packaging efficiency.

The world of 2026 will make those earlier challenges look rudimentary.

Why the 2026 rules may amplify factory advantages

Two pillars define the 2026 chassis-power unit relationship: active aero and energy management. Both reward integration and close cooperation between design departments, and expose the limits of customer structures.

Active aero, replacing the current DRS model, will rebalance the aerodynamic philosophy of the cars, with a high-drag/high-downforce configuration for cornering and a low-drag configuration for straights.

The system requires precise calibration not only of switching speeds but also of how much electric deployment is needed. Works teams will have an advantage in trying to optimise the two simultaneously.

“A customer team seeking to win may need an extraordinary chassis concept”

Energy management, meanwhile, becomes more prominent because of the increased split between internal combustion and electric recovery. The reduction in MGU-H complexity places more pressure on the MGU-K and the battery to shape the car’s lap-to-lap behaviour. It is precisely the kind of circular design ecosystem that works teams relish and customer teams fear.

If 2022’s ground-effect regulations highlighted mechanical-aero interaction, 2026 elevates the power unit.

The clearest advantage for works teams in 2026 will not be that packaging suddenly matters – it always has – but that the new rules magnify the consequences of early architectural choices. Unlike the converged hybrid era of the late 2010s, the 2026 reset reintroduces uncertainty around cooling demand, energy deployment and aero-power unit interaction, locking teams into concepts that may define the entire regulation cycle.

Active aero compounds this effect. Cars will alternate between two aerodynamic modes, forcing teams to design cars whose cooling and bodywork work just as well in both. Works teams can design their power unit cooling, battery placement and exhaust routing with those transitions in mind. Customer teams must instead adapt their aero philosophy to a power unit conceived around someone else’s priorities.

Energy deployment is also no longer an isolated performance tool. In 2026 it becomes structurally linked to aero behaviour, with electric power compensating for drag reduction and shaping how aggressively teams can run low-drag modes. That places battery cooling and MGU-K integration at the heart of aerodynamic performance – an area where factory teams hold a decisive coordination advantage.