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Laurence Edmondson
McLaren has released the first images of the car that Lando Norris will use to defend his Formula 1 title, albeit finished in a provisional test livery.
The MCL40 will take to the track for the first time at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya later this week, when F1 pre-season testing begins in a private test.
Each team is allowed to race three days over a five-day period this week, and the defending constructors’ champions have elected to push their first day back to Tuesday or Wednesday to maximize development time.
When it hits the track in Barcelona, the MCL40 will sport an all-black livery ahead of the launch of its race livery on February 9 in Bahrain, two days before the start of the second pre-season test at the Bahrain International Circuit.
McLaren made a deliberate decision to delay its first day of operation later in the week so it could maximize development time and run the car on a test bench at AVL’s advanced automotive testing facility in Austria last week.
“We wanted to give ourselves as much time as possible for development,” team principal Andrea Stella said last week. “You will all know that you are allowed to test three days out of the five that are available in Barcelona, and then we will start from day two or day three and test for three days.”
Speaking about the reason for using the AVL facilities, Stella said: “I think this is common practice now in Formula One, so that some fundamental systems of the car can be approved.
“Much more than you can do when you run some of these subsystems [on rigs]like the gearbox on a gearbox platform and a test bench that we can have here at MTC. “It’s a facility, AVL, that we’ve been using for some time.”
Seven of the 11 F1 teams are expected to take to the track on Monday in Barcelona, but Ferrari has also confirmed it will wait until Tuesday before embarking on the first of its three days of testing.
Although McLaren enters the season as defending champions, Stella said the scope of regulatory changes for 2026 negates any advantage from 2025.
“We are champions, but we will not continue to be champions until 2026,” he said. “Everyone will start from the starting grid. Everyone will start from scratch.
“You know, our internal narrative is that whatever we achieve, we’re going to have to deserve it. And we’re going to have to earn it on the field. So that’s our mind, that’s our philosophy.”
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Images released by McLaren on Monday likely omit some of the MCL40’s finer details, but chief designer Rob Marshall said no major improvements are planned between now and the first race in Australia on March 8.
“Between Barcelona and Melbourne, I think what you see is probably more or less what we’ll bring to the first race,” he said. “Much of our effort will focus on understanding this [package].
“In addition, we need to take into account what the opposition is doing. We need to be inspired by what they can or cannot achieve and what they can or cannot show us.
“We’re really going to have to be very focused on understanding this car. It’s very complicated. It’s all new.”
Norris, who won his first F1 title in the final round of the 2025 season, will be joined by Oscar Piastri at McLaren for the fourth consecutive year in 2026.
