Andrea Stella has admitted that McLaren’s strategic choice to push the development of its 2025 car right up to the final checkered flag paid off in silverware, but it also left the Woking-based outfit on the back foot at the start of Formula 1’s new era.
The admission offers a revealing explanation for why McLaren, having swept both championships last season, found itself playing catch-up when the radically revised 2026 regulations arrived.
McLaren had spent much of 2025 looking like the benchmark of the grid. But as the title fight intensified and Max Verstappen and Red Bull refused to disappear from the picture, the Woking squad had little choice but to keep feeding resources into its existing machine.
That commitment helped McLaren secure the coveted world double. But it also left the team facing a rather awkward bill when the rules changed.
The championship came with a cost
The sport’s 2026 regulations effectively wiped the slate clean for teams, introducing sweeping changes that Stella describes as potentially the biggest regulatory upheaval Formula 1 has ever seen.
Mercedes adapted fastest, emerging as the early force of the new era, while McLaren struggled to reproduce the authority it had enjoyed throughout much of 2025.
Podiums arrived, but victories remained elusive until McLaren and Lando Norris finally returned to the top step in Hungary last month after introducing a substantial upgrade.
Looking back at the transition, Stella acknowledged that the team’s previous success had consequences.
“After three years of steady progress that saw us win three out of four world titles between 2024 and 2025, the start of this season has been a real reset,” he said.
“Not only because the rule changes were probably the most significant ever in the history of this sport, but above all because we realised just how heavy a price we had paid for the effort we put in during 2025 to secure the world double.”
In championship terms, McLaren’s development push was an understandable gamble. In hindsight, however, the consequences were impossible to ignore.
McLaren chose to respond, not make excuses
The danger for a team emerging from such a difficult reset is that frustration can quickly turn into finger-pointing. Stella insists McLaren went the other way.
“We could have fallen apart; we could have found excuses for not being able to start the championship as we’d finished the previous one, but that wasn’t the case,” the Italian explained.
“We tried to understand the technical and strategic reasons, and we focused our efforts. And that makes me truly proud of this team.”
That response has become particularly important as McLaren has gradually clawed its way back into contention. The Hungarian breakthrough, following the major upgrade, offered tangible evidence that the team's painstaking analysis was beginning to pay off.
For Stella, though, the biggest lesson from the difficult opening half of 2026 has gone beyond aerodynamics, chassis performance or development timing. It has been about the people responsible for fixing the problem.
Read also:
Hakkinen warns McLaren on Verstappen move: ‘Why rock the boat?’“I believe the most important lesson we’ve taken away from these seven months of hard work is that, in times of great difficulty, unity is strength,” he said.
“We’ve demonstrated, first and foremost to ourselves, just how crucial team cohesion is to bouncing back and getting back on track towards the top.”
McLaren therefore heads into the next phase of 2026 with a rather different story to tell. The team paid heavily for chasing last year’s double right to the finish line, and Mercedes made it pay again when the new rules arrived.
But the more important question now is whether that costly lesson has made McLaren stronger. Its recovery in Hungary suggests the answer may be yes.
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