McLaren’s last two seasons have been a slow-motion turnaround. From 2022’s slow start to 2025’s championship contention. There are several reasons this happened, and most of them have nothing to do with the car.

Wind tunnel#

The MTC opened a new full-scale wind tunnel in late 2023. Before that, McLaren had been using the Toyota Cologne facility on a contract basis — which meant limited tunnel time and travel costs eating budget. Owning their tunnel changed everything: more correlation runs, faster development cycle, better confidence in design decisions.

Andrea Stella as team principal#

Bringing back a hands-on engineer instead of another corporate PM was the most important call McLaren made. Stella is a race engineer at heart — he understands what the drivers feel, what the data shows, and how to bridge them. Communication inside the team is dramatically better than the Seidl era.

Driver pairing#

Norris is fast and hard-working. Piastri is fast and unflappable. Together they extract close to all the performance the car has, on most weekends. The gap between McLaren’s two cars in qualifying is consistently smaller than at any other top team. That’s a sign of internal alignment, not just talent.

CFD and methodology#

McLaren has been an early adopter of GPU-accelerated CFD and machine learning approaches in aerodynamic optimization. Reportedly some of their floor designs in 2024–2025 came out of automated parameter sweeps that human aerodynamicists wouldn’t have tried. This is the future of car development and McLaren is ahead.

What can stop them#

Red Bull’s history of in-season development. Red Bull’s setup flexibility. Driver lineup if Max keeps performing this way. And budget cap pressure — McLaren has been one of the more aggressive spenders in the cap era and may need to reduce in 2026–2027.

This is going to be a real championship fight, and that’s good for the sport.