After a first half of the season in which McLaren has, to some extent, paid the price for the final development push it made in 2025 to secure the World Championship, the Woking-based team will introduce a new technical direction at the Hungarian Grand Prix. The upcoming upgrades are based on everything the engineers have learned during the opening part of the 2026 campaign and will also shape development throughout the remainder of the season.
Despite Lando Norris securing a well-deserved third place in Saturday’s Sprint race, McLaren’s home weekend at Silverstone passed by almost unnoticed. It was a result far below the expectations surrounding the reigning Constructors’ Champions. Perhaps that is the most telling aspect of all—a podium is no longer considered headline-worthy because much more is now expected from McLaren.
A few weeks ago, Team Principal Andrea Stella openly admitted that McLaren currently trails Mercedes by several months in terms of development. Closing that gap requires repeating the same formula that allowed the team to win the championship during the ground-effect era: developing the car faster and more efficiently than its rivals.
McLaren searching for more aerodynamic consistency
A major part of McLaren’s recovery depends on finding a higher level of usable aerodynamic downforce across every type of corner.
Following the Spanish Grand Prix, Andrea Stella explained that the team’s data showed the MCL40 was highly competitive in high-speed corners but struggled more in slow and medium-speed sections.
Those limitations resurfaced at Silverstone, where the car lacked pure downforce through corners such as Copse, Stowe and the circuit’s fast sequences. As he often does, Stella was transparent in explaining that the particularly windy conditions during the British Grand Prix exaggerated both the strengths and weaknesses of every car on the grid, including McLaren’s.
Small updates for Spa, major package in Hungary
McLaren will already arrive at Spa-Francorchamps with an updated rear wing, bringing part of its development programme forward. However, the most significant changes will debut one week later in Hungary.
Those upgrades will not simply be new components, but will also introduce important conceptual changes that naturally occur during the early stages of a new technical regulations cycle.
“During development, I think we followed certain conceptual directions that, as we continue learning more about the 2026 regulations, we are now reorienting. Particularly from an aerodynamic perspective, that isn’t something you can change within a week. It usually takes one or two months,” explained Andrea Stella.
“I believe those one or two months represent the delay we currently have. Looking at the leading teams, there is probably a development window of two or three months between one major update and another.”
That delay can be linked to several factors, beginning with the fact that, even without introducing major upgrades during the second half of last season, McLaren still had to continue optimizing the MCL39 to secure the championship. It is a situation that Red Bull is experiencing even more acutely now after investing so heavily in its 2025 title campaign.
Hungary marks the beginning of McLaren’s new development path
For that reason, the Hungarian Grand Prix will represent a key milestone ahead of both the remainder of the 2026 season and McLaren’s long-term future.
The Budapest upgrade package will begin integrating a revised development philosophy built around everything the team has learned during the opening races. This is a natural progression because every team’s first wave of upgrades was largely designed during the winter, whereas future developments are now much more heavily influenced by real-world track data.
In many ways, the new front wing introduced in Canada, which was significantly different from the version McLaren started the season with, already represented the first step in this new direction.
As Andrea Stella had previously anticipated, many future upgrades would be built around that concept because the front wing is the first aerodynamic surface to interact with the airflow and therefore influences everything happening further downstream on the car.
A clear direction at last
“We now have a clear development direction, but in some areas of the car it has taken a couple of months to translate that into reality. We should start seeing the first results of this approach in Hungary and then, hopefully, continue introducing more upgrades throughout the rest of the season,” Stella added at Silverstone.
With development now progressing at such an intense pace during the early stages of the new regulations, every update has the potential to make a significant difference.
“I have to say development at the factory has been very strong for several months now. That led to the upgrades introduced in Miami, and another package will arrive in Hungary, followed by more after the summer break. I believe Belgium will still be a rather difficult event for us, and it will be challenging to match the performance level Ferrari and Mercedes are currently showing.”
“Hopefully, from Hungary onwards, we will begin to see a real improvement in our competitiveness. This season every update has produced progress. We are still far from reaching performance convergence, and even the strongest teams must continue bringing upgrades because, otherwise, their rivals will catch them.”
Downforce remains the priority
Generating more downforce while making the car less sensitive to gusts of wind—two characteristics that also depend on the aerodynamic map—would bring benefits in several different areas, including tyre performance.
When conditions are particularly cool or circuits generate little tyre energy, as McLaren’s drivers pointed out after Silverstone, the MCL40 struggles slightly more than its rivals to bring the tyres into their optimal operating window.
This creates a double challenge. More downforce allows the car to carry greater speed through corners, but part of McLaren’s performance deficit also comes from its inability to consistently operate the tyres in their ideal temperature window. That weakness has been evident recently in Monaco and Canada, while similar signs had already appeared earlier in the season in Australia and China.
Beyond the fact that the biggest upgrades will arrive in Hungary, this is also why there is greater concern ahead of Spa-Francorchamps. The Belgian circuit demands the perfect compromise between aerodynamic downforce, efficiency, Power Unit performance—where McLaren still lacks some of the know-how of the manufacturers that developed their own engines—and the ability to bring the tyres into the correct operating window despite the circuit’s long straights.
Andrea Stella pointed to Cadillac‘s progress towards Q2 as another example of how development has become more important than ever in 2026. McLaren believes it now has the tools, the ideas and, above all, a clear technical direction to turn around what has so far been a disappointing season and once again become a genuine threat to Ferrari and Mercedes.
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