(Motorsport-Total.com) – Is McLaren permanently back on the path to success? The world champion team celebrated its first win of the season in Hungary with Lando Norris and could have easily achieved a one-two finish if not for Oscar Piastri’s bad luck.
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The racing team brought an extensive upgrade package to the Hungaroring, which was mainly built around a new floor and apparently perfectly matched the requirements in Budapest. “I think the improvement in terms of competitiveness can be fully attributed to the upgrades,” says team principal Andrea Stella.
Nevertheless, the Italian admits that the team did not necessarily think the lap time gain would be enough for pole position in Hungary. “And we definitely did not think it would be enough to run such a strong pace in the race,” he emphasizes.
Above all, Lando Norris was able to pull away from the competition, which became especially evident when the Briton had clear track ahead. In the end, he finished 15 seconds ahead of Max Verstappen, although Stella does not want to overestimate the pace difference.
“It also depends heavily on which tire you are running on, the phase the tires are in, and how old they are. So I don’t want to draw premature conclusions, but it looks like we might have had a bit more advantage in the race than in qualifying,” says the team principal – where the margin was only 0.012 seconds.
With its upgrades, McLaren is currently working on correcting the conceptual flaws of its car. According to Stella, the improvements on the car often follow a different concept. “After completing the MCL40 – and to some extent also by looking at the concepts of some cars that were faster than us – we realized that we had to correct the course,” he says.
“From this perspective, I can only express a big thank you and huge praise – above all – to our aerodynamics department, which understood what was necessary in terms of conceptual development. And we know: once McLaren understands which direction to take, we are able to develop very effectively.”
Tires remain in focus
Another central topic for the team is the tuning of the package with the tires. McLaren has been considered very gentle on tires in recent years and had advantages over the competition in this regard. Especially in hot races, these advantages came into play, while in cooler races like Las Vegas, problems often arose.
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Since Hungary traditionally counts among the warmer races on the calendar, Stella wants to wait and see. “It still has to be shown whether we are competitive when the races are on the cooler side,” he says.
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“When we had a cool race in Canada, we were absolutely nowhere. So there is still some work to be done on the interaction with the tires, but it looks like some of the improvements have been effective in hot conditions.”
At the same time, the team principal also wants to praise manufacturing and logistics regarding the Hungary package, as the team had only “extremely little time” to deliver the parts. “Some parts only arrived Friday evening to be mounted on Oscar’s car Saturday morning. So it was a race against time.”
Half a second for the best?
The question is whether McLaren can maintain its form and now be a permanent candidate for poles and wins. According to Stella, this depends on whether his team manages to bring further improvements for the MCL40. “If we want to be able to consistently fight for wins in the future, we have to focus on delivering further upgrades,” he says.
That is of course the plan, but Stella also emphasizes that McLaren is not naive. “We know that this will be the plan for all teams. So, as it has always been in this 2026 season, it is an arms race with upgrades.”
Stella expects that the best car at the end of the season will still have found up to half a second. “So definitely a lot of work lies ahead for everyone, not just McLaren.”
“The good news is that McLaren is now back in the middle of this development race and at the same time fighting for the top.”
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