McLaren’s latest MCL40 upgrades have delivered an even bigger high-speed improvement than the team expected, helping Lando Norris secure pole position for the 2026 Dutch Grand Prix. Team principal Andrea Stella admitted that the car’s performance through Zandvoort’s fastest corners exceeded McLaren’s own predictions, but the breakthrough has also highlighted a compromise the team still needs to solve: finding more grip in slow-speed sections without sacrificing its new strength.
That balance could be crucial over the full race distance. McLaren suffered more pronounced rear tyre degradation during the Sprint, allowing Charles Leclerc to exploit the weakness, and the team responded with set-up changes before Grand Prix qualifying. The immediate result could hardly have been better, with Norris taking pole, but the real question is whether those adjustments will also make the MCL40 more consistent during the race.
McLaren MCL40 upgrades deliver more than expected
After a difficult start to the season, partly influenced by the intense 2025 championship battle that continued until the final round, McLaren’s 2026 campaign finally appears to be gathering momentum. The recovery has been driven by something that has distinguished the Woking team in recent seasons: the quality of its development programme.
The upgrades introduced in Budapest and Zandvoort were designed to recover the aerodynamic load that had been missing from the MCL40, and they have achieved that objective. In Formula 1, additional downforce can solve a wide range of problems, and in McLaren’s case it has breathed new life into the car.
The latest developments have been particularly focused around the rear of the MCL40, with McLaren bringing further rear-end upgrades for the Dutch Grand Prix to complement the package first introduced in Hungary.
Lando Norris’ pole position at Zandvoort offers the clearest demonstration of what has changed. Much of his advantage was built through the fast corners of the second sector, precisely the type of section that was expected to benefit most from the new components. The scale of that improvement, however, surprised even McLaren’s engineers.
“When we brought the upgrades in Hungary, we knew they would be more effective in the high-speed sections. But, in a way, the proportion in which that has materialised here at Zandvoort is almost beyond expectations. We didn’t think we would be as competitive as we appeared in qualifying through Turns 7 and 8,” Andrea Stella explained after qualifying.
McLaren’s high-speed strength reaches another level
Being strong through long, fast corners is not a new characteristic for McLaren. What has changed is the size of the advantage.
The MCL40 had already demonstrated during the early stages of the Zandvoort weekend that it was particularly competitive through the fast corners of sector two, even outperforming Ferrari. The longer and faster the corner, the more McLaren’s strengths tend to emerge.
That characteristic had already been visible in Spain, but the recent developments have allowed the team to take another step. McLaren has also experimented with a distinctive rear-wing philosophy at Zandvoort, adding another element to an aerodynamic package that had already helped the team win twice at the Dutch circuit in recent seasons.
The numbers from Saturday qualifying underline the difference. At Turn 7, Lando Norris was 5 km/h faster than the quickest Ferrari, driven by Lewis Hamilton, and 9 km/h faster than George Russell’s Mercedes. At Turn 8, Norris held an 8 km/h advantage over George Russell.
The situation is almost reversed in the slower corners. McLaren continues to encounter more difficulties during turn-in and through the direction change in the chicane, an area that had already emerged as a weakness on Friday.
Andrea Stella wants more slow-speed grip
The problem is not unexpected. Andrea Stella had already explained in Barcelona that McLaren needed to improve the MCL40 through medium- and low-speed sections. Every Formula 1 car inevitably has areas where it excels and others where it needs development.
The recent upgrades have delivered exactly the improvement McLaren wanted in fast corners. However, because the gains have actually exceeded expectations, Stella suggested the team would willingly surrender some of that high-speed advantage if it could redistribute performance towards the slower sections and create a better overall balance.
This trade-off becomes particularly important when comparing qualifying pace with race performance.
Over a single lap, the additional mechanical grip provided by the soft tyre can disguise certain weaknesses. A similar phenomenon could be seen with Red Bull in 2025, when the softer compound helped compensate for limitations in pure aerodynamic load.
Over longer runs, however, that extra grip gradually disappears as the tyre wears. At that point, the underlying weaknesses become more visible – exactly what happened to McLaren during the Zandvoort Sprint.
Rear tyre degradation exposed McLaren in the Sprint
“In the race this deficit gets bigger, because when you are doing continuous laps you can’t rely on the grip from the tyre. You need to generate the grip through aerodynamics, and here we showed some difficulties during the Sprint race,” Andrea Stella explained.
McLaren therefore made set-up adjustments after the Sprint with the specific aim of improving its effectiveness through the slower parts of the circuit ahead of the main race.
There is a straightforward reason why this area receives so much attention. Drivers naturally spend more time negotiating slow corners because of the lower speeds involved. They brake earlier and remain in the traction phase for longer, meaning losses can accumulate quickly.
That becomes increasingly difficult to compensate for during a race when tyre performance begins to drop and the extra grip is no longer available. A driver can attempt to push harder through fast corners, but the potential time gain in those sections is generally more limited than what can be lost through slower sections.
The challenge also becomes more complicated when the rear tyres begin to fade. The driver can no longer attack the high-speed corners with the same confidence, partly because engineers want to limit the energy being transferred into the tyre and partly because the risk of rear-end sliding increases.
That weakness became particularly evident during the Sprint and was one of the factors that helped Charles Leclerc complete his overtake on Lando Norris. Tyre behaviour was expected to play an important role throughout the weekend, with the Zandvoort tyre strategy placing additional emphasis on degradation management.
Ferrari remains a major race threat for McLaren
Looking towards the Grand Prix, Andrea Stella believes Ferrari remains a particularly dangerous opponent and perhaps McLaren’s toughest rival in terms of long-run pace.
There is still some uncertainty over whether Charles Leclerc’s strong Sprint performance was purely a reflection of Ferrari’s race pace or was also influenced by his choice of soft tyres. That compound also performed particularly well on Oliver Bearman’s Haas, adding another variable to the comparison.
McLaren will nevertheless head into the Grand Prix with three important changes compared with the Sprint.
First, its straight-line speed deficit to Mercedes has been reduced from 12 km/h to just 5 km/h, suggesting that something has been adjusted in the electrical energy deployment maps. Second, the team has revised the set-up using the data collected during the shorter race. Finally, those changes have already produced an encouraging first result in qualifying.
With Norris on pole, McLaren could hardly have asked for a stronger response. The team’s recent development push has clearly raised the MCL40’s ceiling, particularly through Zandvoort’s fastest corners, and the latest package has delivered more than the engineers originally expected.
The remaining question is whether McLaren can reproduce that level over a full race distance. If its set-up changes reduce the slow-speed deficit and control the rear degradation seen in the Sprint, the MCL40 could convert its exceptional qualifying speed into an equally convincing Grand Prix performance.
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