McLaren came close to pulling off a major result during the Miami Formula 1 weekend before eventually surrendering to the superior race pace of Mercedes, currently considered the benchmark of the championship. Analysis carried out inside the papaya garage has revealed the true competitive order on a grid increasingly dominated by the relentless study of rival innovations. This is precisely why Red Bull’s latest sidepod upgrade has attracted enormous interest from the engineers led by Rob Marshall at Woking.
Miami verdict: Mercedes still sets the benchmark
Despite securing a dominant one-two finish in the Sprint Race, McLaren was forced to concede defeat during the Miami Grand Prix itself, highlighting how operational perfection is not always enough against outright performance. Internal evaluations from the Woking pit wall confirm that the Brackley-based team still holds a safety margin worth a couple of tenths over the rest of the field.
According to McLaren technicians, the perception of Mercedes struggling during the opening phase of the Miami weekend was simply an illusion — an anomaly caused by the German team not fully optimizing its potential rather than a genuine loss of performance advantage over its rivals. McLaren management emphasized that the Anglo-German car’s main strength continues to be its pure race pace.
In such an incredibly tight competition, where four teams are separated by mere thousandths of a second, the papaya squad has managed to compensate for its lack of outright speed thanks to more consistent tyre management, a strength already developed during last season. Nevertheless, frustration inside the McLaren garage remained evident throughout the Florida weekend.
There was genuine internal belief that, by maximizing race execution and maintaining track position with Lando Norris during the decisive phases of the Grand Prix, victory could still have been achievable even against a car that was objectively faster. What Miami ultimately confirmed, however, is that McLaren is no longer simply fighting for podiums — it is now a genuine title contender.
McLaren’s analysis of the new Red Bull sidepods
The American weekend partially reshuffled the competitive hierarchy because the leading teams all introduced major upgrade packages. McLaren itself debuted seven new components in an attempt to close the gap to the front, but the development that captured the most attention throughout the paddock was Red Bull’s aggressive aerodynamic evolution.
The Milton Keynes-based team radically redesigned its sidepods, introducing a completely new upper profile characterized by an extremely pronounced air channel. The goal is to maximize airflow, increase aerodynamic load, and improve thermal dissipation. The philosophy has changed dramatically, as Red Bull has abandoned the previous inwash concept that directed airflow inward.
With the latest update, the car now features a sort of “bathtub” section at the top of the sidepods, which then widens all the way toward the outer edge of the floor. Much like the concept previously seen on the Ferrari F1-75, the purpose is to help manage the turbulent airflow generated by the rotation of the front tyres. Particularly striking is the extremely steep ramp that pushes airflow downward until it reaches floor level.
McLaren’s leadership openly acknowledged the intelligence and innovation behind Red Bull’s design approach, praising the team’s ability to exploit certain regulatory grey areas with remarkable precision. For this reason, a detailed study program has already begun at Woking to analyze the Austrian car’s shapes and understand the real aerodynamic advantages delivered by the package — benefits that allowed Max Verstappen to secure a front-row qualifying position in Miami while significantly reducing what previously appeared to be a substantial performance deficit.
Formula 1 2026 still searching for a clear identity
This intense development battle perfectly reflects the brand-new technical era introduced this season, one that abandoned ground effect dominance in favor of “overbody” aerodynamics combined with active wings. The result has been a major shift in philosophy that inevitably produced a wide range of radically different engineering concepts, with no universally accepted direction yet emerging.
From Ferrari’s “Macarena-style” rear wing to Mercedes’ extremely complex front-wing concepts and now Red Bull’s aggressive new sidepods, the technical projections emerging from McLaren suggest that the long-anticipated aerodynamic convergence across the grid is still a distant prospect. By the end of the previous regulations cycle, Formula 1 cars had begun to resemble one another in almost every detail.
Right now, Formula 1 2026 cars remain in a very early stage of development. The sheer variety of extreme solutions seen on track confirms that teams are still far from discovering the perfect interpretation of the regulations. In this constant phase of experimentation and analysis, maximizing the performance of the current package remains the only path toward progress while searching for the breakthrough concept capable of changing the competitive order.
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