{"id":249313,"date":"2026-04-28T08:30:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T08:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/249313\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T08:30:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T08:30:15","slug":"2-years-after-a-breakthrough-win-in-miami-can-mclaren-bounce-back-in-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/249313\/","title":{"rendered":"2 Years After a Breakthrough Win in Miami, Can McLaren Bounce Back in 2026?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Miami Grand Prix is a special anniversary for Lando Norris and his McLaren team<\/a>. It marks the second anniversary of their victory in the 2024 race\u2014a win that showed that the team was finally back at the sharp end of the field after years of frustration. Then, 12 months and nine Grand Prix wins after that, the Hard Rock Stadium venue was the site of a dominant one-two finish, this time led by Oscar Piastri.<\/p>\n

In other words, Miami has been good to McLaren in recent times, and it will be intriguing to see how the team performs this time around. It has not been an ideal beginning to the 2026 season for the reigning World Champions. Between them, Norris and Piastri managed only one start in the first two races, and while the Papaya showed much better pace in round three in Suzuka, Mercedes and Ferrari have been ahead overall.<\/p>\n

The new power unit regulations have played out differently at each venue so far, and Miami will be the fourth sample. The big question is how the changes to the rules introduced for this weekend will play out, and which teams get on top of them more effectively. On top of that, everyone will be bringing upgrade packages, having had a full month without the distraction of going racing with which to work on new parts. How many novelties each team will bring\u2014and what impact of any performance gain on the pecking order will be\u2014remains to be seen.<\/p>\n

\"f1<\/p>\n

Kym Illman\/\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Intriguingly, McLaren boss Andreas Stella<\/a> has not been shy about proclaiming that over the Miami and Montreal weekends (in other words, in two steps), his team will field a \u201ccompletely new car.\u201d He says that it was always the plan, and the Bahrain and Jeddah race cancellations just helped to streamline the process. Given how successfully McLaren has applied similar packages in the recent past, with the real world of the racetrack backing up the results of the wind tunnel, the rest of the field would be wise to take note.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn our intent there was always the idea to deliver sort of a completely new car, and especially from an aerodynamic upgrades point of view, for the North American races,\u201d says Stella. \u201cSo we could keep up with this plan. Obviously, the fact that the calendar has been changed sort of helped a little bit. I’m sure it helped all the other teams that could work more streamlined towards upgrading the car, rather than being busy with racing. But I could say overall that across Miami and Canada, we will see an entirely new MCL40.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stella remains coy on what the impact will be, as no one has an idea yet how much new stuff other teams will bring. However, he certainly sounds optimistic about the potential impact. \u201cAgain, I would like to stress that this is what I would expect of most of our competitors,\u201d he cautions. \u201cSo not necessarily is it going to be a shift in the pecking order, it will be effectively just a check who has been able to add more performance within the same time frame.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"f1<\/p>\n

NurPhoto\/\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

He suggests that the first priority is to close the gap to the two teams ahead, rather than necessarily being able to jump them. \u201cWe also have some performance to recover, if we look at Mercedes and, to some extent, Ferrari as well,\u201d he says. \u201cBut we are quite happy with the development that we’ve been able to manage\u2014so hopefully we should be able to see a slightly more competitive MCL40 in Miami and then in Canada, considering that the last race was already a decent competitive performance in Japan. So we definitely look forward to the next races.\u201d<\/p>\n

McLaren has clearly been tripped up by the change of regulations. As Stella pointed out a few weeks ago, one of the issues was the fact that power unit supplier Mercedes HPP had such a head start in understanding the nuances of the rules, allowing the works team to benefit, and leaving McLaren and fellow customers Williams and Alpine to try to catch up. That process is well underway now, and Stella has stressed that HPP has been very supportive.<\/p>\n

The bottom line is that the MCL40 is simply not as strong a chassis package as the Mercedes or Ferrari, perhaps impacted by last year\u2019s title fight using up R&D resources, and by McLaren\u2019s World Champion status giving it less wind tunnel time than rivals. Stella could be forgiven for being a little frustrated that the new rule set came when it did, after just one drivers\u2019 title for the team under the old regulations\u2014and has thus made it that much harder for the team to have the sort of consistent run of success enjoyed by Ferrari with Michael Schumacher, Red Bull with Sebastian Vettel, Mercedes with Lewis Hamilton, and Red Bull again with Max Verstappen.<\/p>\n

\"f1<\/p>\n

Kym Illman\/\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

In his typical glass half-full style, Stella doesn\u2019t want to use that as an excuse. Instead he sees it as a challenge that the team has to tackle. \u201cI would like to emphasize that, and we were reflecting internally on this, we take quite a bit of pride internally at McLaren that we managed to turn things around in a continuity of regulations [to 2025],\u201d he says. \u201cWe had kind of less know-how; we needed to generate IP; we needed to generate the solutions to gain a performance and competitive advantage. And since 2023, we managed to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He adds, \u201cAt the same time, while for sure we would have liked to continue with the same regulations, because we were starting from a competitive position, we sort of wanted to test ourselves. We wanted to test our level of maturity, our level of ability to generate new know-how when there’s a change, a reset of the regulations. So, while slightly uncomfortable, it’s actually a challenge that we welcome. It’s a challenge that will give us a measure of where we are effectively as a team.\u201d<\/p>\n

He concedes that the process has perhaps been harder than expected. \u201cI have to say that even some of the challenges that we started with, in terms of start of the season, with a little bit of a mixed bag, kind of make the overall test even more probing,\u201d he says. \u201cBut\u2014even more interesting. So we are we are enjoying it. We look forward to show on track what we’ve been able to produce in the ground over this month, especially the last couple of months, I think they’ve been quite positive in terms of development of the current background.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for the coming weekend, it will be an intriguing test of that progress, with the latest rule changes adding a further curve ball. Norris concedes he is as keen as the rest of the world to discover how it all shakes out. \u201cIt’s obviously a track that we performed very well at as well as a team, not just as drivers, over the past couple of years,\u201d says the reigning champion. \u201cAnd last year, it was one of our best tracks of the season in terms of pace comparing to others. And it’s a different track, and it might still just suit the car a little bit more than some other places. Japan certainly suited the car a little bit more than the first couple races. How it will change things, I don’t know. We kind of have to wait and see in some ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"f1<\/p>\n

Mark Sutton – Formula 1\/\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Piastri<\/a>, meanwhile, downplays the whole power unit discussion, and stresses that the team simply has to make its car quicker. \u201cMercedes yes, I think they had a better understanding of the power unit and how to get the most out of it,\u201d he says. \u201cBut we’re clearly still a fair way behind on just downforce and performance from the chassis as well. So I’m sure that gap in the power unit understanding will close a little bit, but our biggest deficit in Japan was not that we were lacking time from the power unit, or how we explored it. It was that our car wasn’t as good as theirs. I think that’s the bigger piece of the puzzle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Related Stories<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Miami Grand Prix is a special anniversary for Lando Norris and his McLaren team. It marks the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":249314,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[82695,26304,109241,26306,26305,123,125,124,109240],"class_list":["post-249313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-collection-motorsport","tag-content-type-news","tag-contentid-67b0541a-07f6-4a7e-b25b-57a267cbf31c","tag-displaytype-standard-article","tag-locale-us","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news","tag-shorttitle-can-mclaren-bounce-back-in-miami"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}