McLaren has released the first images of the car Lando Norris will use to defend his Formula 1 title, albeit finished in an interim testing livery.
The MCL40 will hit the track for the first time at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya later this week as F1 preseason testing gets underway at a private test.
Each team is allowed to run on three days over a five-day period this week, and the defending constructors’ champions have elected to push its first day to Tuesday or Wednesday in order to maximise development time.
When it emerges on track in Barcelona, the MCL40 will be in 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 preseason test at the Bahrain International Circuit.
McLaren made a deliberate decision to push its first day of running later in the week so that it could maximise development time and run the car on a dyno 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 all may know that you are allowed to test three days over the five that are available in Barcelona, and then we will start from either day two or day three and we will test for three days.”
Speaking about the reason for using the AVL facility, Stella said: “I think this is common practise now in Formula One, such that you can sign off some fundamental systems of the car.
“Much more than what you can do when you run some of these subsystems [on rigs], like the gearbox in a gearbox rig and dyno that we may have here at MTC. It’s a facility, AVL, that we have been using for some time.”
Seven of F1’s 11 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 at the test.
Although McLaren enters the season as defending champions, Stella said the extent of regulation changes for 2026 wipes out any advantage from 2025.
“We are champions, but we don’t carry the being champions into 2026,” he said. “Everyone will start from the starting blocks. Everyone will start from zero.
“You know, like our internal narrative is anything we will achieve, we will have to deserve it. And we will have to earn it on the ground. So that’s our mind, that’s our philosophy.”
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The images released by McLaren on Monday likely omit some of the finer details on the MCL40, but chief designer Rob Marshall said no major upgrades are planned between now and the first race in Australia on March 8.
“Between Barcelona and Melbourne, I think what you see is probably pretty much what we will bring to the first race,” he said. “A lot of our effort will be into understanding this [package].
“Also, we need to take into account what the opposition are up to. We need to be inspired by what they may or may not achieve and may or may not show us.
“We really are going to have to be very focused on getting our heads around this car. It’s very complicated. It’s all new.”
Norris, who secured his first F1 title at the final round of the 2025 season, will be partnered by Oscar Piastri at McLaren for a fourth consecutive year in 2026.
