McLaren Chief Opens Up On Radical Approach To 2025 F1 Car

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has opened up about the team's radical approach to its 2025 car, the MCL39, despite achieving much success with the MCL38 from the 2024 season. While several teams won't follow a revolutionary overhaul approach on their 2025 challengers, considering the onset of a new era of regulations in 2026, McLaren revealed that it has gone all out on the MCL39, where "everything has been subject to optimization."

McLaren clinched its first Constructors' Championship in 26 years last season, courtesy of a series of upgrades from the Miami Grand Prix onwards that significantly boosted the car's performance. The team overtook Red Bull in the championship after the Baku race and maintained its momentum. However, Ferrari emerged as a strong contender toward the end of the season, surpassing Red Bull and closing the gap to McLaren by a significant margin.

With teams being allowed to work on their 2026 cars from the 1st of January this year, several outfits will divert a considerable number of resources to the development of their cars of the new era. McLaren, however, understands well enough that the 2025 championship remains within reach and thus no stone has been left unturned to develop the MCL39 into a dominant car.

The car in question debuted in a temporary camo livery during a wet filming day at Silverstone. Stella admitted that the new car underwent considerable design changes, particularly from the sidepods onwards. Speaking on the team's bold approach to its new car, aiming at "raising the bar," Stella said:

"What we tried to achieve with this new car is innovative. It's a car in which we tried to raise the bar in many areas, including the fundamental layout.

"It's something that definitely we evaluated carefully because the MCL38 was already a competitive car, so we needed to be conscious, considerate as to how much we wanted to innovate. But ultimately, we actually went for a relatively challenging approach in terms of how much innovation is in this car. This is predominantly to gain aerodynamic efficiency. At the same time, we still wanted to make some improvements in terms of interaction with the tyres, and what you can do to improve long-run pace.

"Pretty much every fundamental component of the layout has been subject to some innovation in order to gain, sometimes not only by marginal gains, some technical opportunities for development. Everything has been subject to optimisation, sometimes incrementally, sometimes actually quite substantially."

Considering how closely the field is tightening and the urgent need to develop the car before others catch up, Stella revealed the importance of being fast in the technical race's development. He added:

"We have just tried to go as fast as possible in terms of developing the car, which means that there will be some updates during the early races of the season, but this would have been the same even without the 2026 changes of regulations looming ahead.

"We are very aware that last season, even if it had been a successful season, the margins we had mean that we had to be aggressive with the car to try and cash in as much performance as possible. Those margins were so small that considering the development that other teams would have had, had we not gone as fast as possible in terms of development, we might very quickly lose any advantage that we had."

He added:

"We kept full gas in terms of development, and we will see if we have been able to develop more than our competitors from the 2024 to the 2025 car."