McLaren is set to introduce an “entirely new MCL40” Formula 1 car across upcoming races in Miami and Canada.

The British squad has long-planned to bring a B-spec version of its 2026 challenger to the North American rounds on the calendar as it looks to bounce back following a challenging start to the 2026 F1 season.

After reigning world champion Lando Norris could only finish a distant fifth at the season-opener in Australia, and neither he nor team-mate Oscar Piastri took the start in China owing to technical issues, McLaren responded by claiming its first podium of the season last time out in Japan.

Having initially started behind Mercedes and Ferrari, McLaren enjoyed an improved showing at Suzuka as Piastri finished second and could have potentially won it had it not been for the timing of a safety car.

F1’s enforced break in April following the cancellation of two rounds in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia due to the Iran War has given McLaren hope it can further reduce its deficit to the front of the grid when the season resumes at the Miami Grand Prix on 3 May.

“In our intent, there was always the idea to deliver sort of a completely new car, especially from an aerodynamic upgrades point of view, for the North American races,” McLaren team principal Andrea Stella told media including Crash.net on Wednesday. 

“So we could keep up with this plan. Obviously, the fact that the calendar has been changed sort of helped a little bit, like I'm sure helped all the other teams that could work more streamlined towards upgrading the car rather than being busy with racing.

“But I could say overall that across Miami and Canada, we will see an entirely new MCL40." 

However, Stella was keen to stress that McLaren’s rivals will equally benefit from the gap without racing.

“I would like to stress that this is what I would expect of most of our competitors,” he said. “So not necessarily it's going to be a shift in the packing order, it will be effectively just a check who has been able to add more performance within the same time frame. And we also have some performance to recover if we look at Mercedes and to some extent Ferrari as well.

“But we are quite happy with the development that we've been able to manage in the background. So hopefully we should be able to see a slightly more competitive MCL40 in Miami and then in Canada, considering that the last race was already a decent competitive performance in Japan.

“So we definitely look forward to the next races.”

McLaren has history when it comes to turning around a difficult start to an F1 season, having completed a remarkable turnaround in 2023 thanks to an aggressive mid-season upgrade push.

“We take quite a bit of pride internally at McLaren that we managed to turn things around in a continuity of regulations,” Stella added.

“So we had kind of less know-how, we needed to generate IP, we needed to generate the solutions to gain a performance and competitive advantage, and since 2023 we managed to do it. This was something that we definitely wanted to crystallise in terms of our own achievement and consolidate the success that we've been able to produce.

“At the same time, while for sure we would have liked to continue with the same regulations because we were starting from a competitive position, we sort of wanted to test ourselves. We wanted to test our level of maturity, our level of ability to generate new know-how when there's a change, a reset of the regulations.

“So while slightly uncomfortable, it's actually a challenge that we welcome. It's a challenge that will give us a measure of where we are effectively as a team.

“I have to say that even some of the challenges that we started with in terms of the start of the season, with a little bit of a mixed bag, kind of make the overall test even more probing, but even more interesting.

“We are enjoying it, we look forward to show on track what we've been able to produce in the ground over this month, especially the last couple of months. I think they've been quite positive in terms of development of the car in the ground. Hopefully we will see this in Miami, Canada and the following races in terms of development.”