The overall objective remains unchanged, to close the gap to the leading teams and consistently challenge for podium finishes and race victories. With a significant upgrade package scheduled to be introduced for the Hungarian Grand Prix later this month, the entire McLaren Mastercard team remains fully focused on extracting the maximum potential from every aspect of the current package until those developments arrive.
Makes sense when 75% of the calendar is road courses.FittingMechanics wrote: ↑07 Jul 2026, 00:16In other news, McLaren signed Scott Dixon to a multiyear contract in IndyCar.
Zak seems to be going 100% toward ovals and Indy 500. All three drivers will be good on ovals and have plenty of experience.
Dixon is a great champion, of course, but he's 46. Will be 47 next year. It seems like a weird move.FittingMechanics wrote: ↑07 Jul 2026, 00:16In other news, McLaren signed Scott Dixon to a multiyear contract in IndyCar.
Zak seems to be going 100% toward ovals and Indy 500. All three drivers will be good on ovals and have plenty of experience.
This is 100% fake, he said at Silverstone he is very happy with the team and doesn't plan on leaving, and that the team has assured him several times they don't intend to make any change.
https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/arti ... VDfPd9CrBrStella also conceded that part of the reason for McLaren’s current struggles is that last year the team lost some momentum on the 2026 project because it was embroiled in the title fight, with Norris coming out on top against his team mate and a late surge from Max Verstappen.
“Definitely,” he said after Sunday’s race. “I would say that having been in the championship so tight with Red Bull, and Verstappen in particular in the drivers’, we needed some of our attention in terms of keeping working on the car.
“Even if we didn't bring big upgrades, definitely we needed to keep paying attention from a technical point of view to the MCL39. We needed to ensure that we maximised our performance race-by-race, because the challenge from Verstappen was becoming more and more material.”
Crucially the team is now also changing its focus in terms of some key concepts it initially pursued for the 2026 car. That’s something that doesn’t happen overnight.
“During the development I think we adopted some directions from a conceptual point of view, that as we learn more about the 2026 regulations, I would say that we are redirecting," Stella continued.
“And this, like everything, especially from an aerodynamic point of view, is not something that you can get to converge in the space of a week. It normally takes one or two months, and I think this couple of months is the delay that we have at the moment.
https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/arti ... VDfPd9CrBr“So I think that's what we believe – we have now a clear direction in terms of development. But it takes in some areas of the car – or it took – a couple of months to get it to be realised.
“So we should see in Hungary the first results of this approach, and then hopefully more and more upgrades for the rest of the season.”
Stella is confident that the team’s competitive situation will improve from the Hungaroring onwards, with more to come in the races immediately after the summer break.
“My ideal trajectory at the moment is that we would like to close the gap with the next round of upgrades that will happen across the shutdown,” he noted. “With something happening before and something happening after the shutdown.
“I think because we have kind of cleared our ideas as to which are the directions to follow in terms of aerodynamic development, we see now that the development is more sustained than what we had in some phases last year, while defining the launch specification.
“But in my trajectory, I think we are going to close the gap with another step of upgrades, so ideally we will be able to deliver upgrades in the short-term and upgrades in the mid-term – and hopefully by then the others have not disappeared too far in front in the championship.”
