McLaren trying to understand Ferrari’s ‘inspirational’ upgrade volume

McLaren says Ferrari’s vast number of Formula1 car upgrades over the first half of the 2026 season is an “inspiration” as it aims to keep rolling out updates of its own.

The dawn of a new era of regulations triggered a huge development war over the first half of the 2026 campaign, with Ferrari and Red Bull in particular impressing rivals with the quantity of upgrades they have been able to fast-track out of the factory.

That development race is expected to continue after the summer break, before tapering off as teams switch focus to 2027. Ferrari and McLaren have already both brought enough improvements to their respective cars to start snatching race wins away from the initially dominant Mercedes team.

McLaren has at least one more bullet in the chamber for August’s Dutch Grand Prix, while Mercedes is also expected to deploy further upgrades after bringing less novelties to the track than its rivals thus far.

But, like Mercedes, McLaren has also singled out Ferrari as the squad that has impressed the most with the quantity and quality of its car upgrades so far, to the extent that it has prompted the Woking squad to look at its own processes to try and match Maranello’s design and manufacturing pace.

Lando Norris, McLaren

Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images

“I think we’ve done a pretty good job of bringing a lot of upgrades that have added performance to the car,” said McLaren’s engineering technical director Neil Houldey. “But when you look around at our competitors, there are teams [like] Ferrari, who’ve done a fantastic job this year to just drive that development forward.”

When asked by Motorsport.com if he felt Ferrari had front-loaded its development budget under F1’s cost cap, and therefore perhaps created opportunities for McLaren to make a bigger splash after the summer, Houldey replied: “Well, I think we’ve been front-loading what we’ve got available.

“I’d say from a volume stand it does look like Ferrari have managed to do a lot, and it’s something for us to look at and understand how they were able to achieve that. Because you look at that from an aerodynamic development point of view, you look at it from a manufacturing point of view.

“Actually, how they turned around this stuff so quickly, it’s an inspiration for us to look at and say: ‘Come on, we did well in 2024. We did well in 2025. But actually, how do we do even better in 2026 and moving forward into 2027?

“These things, as with anything in F1, if you’re not moving forward and finding ways of doing things faster and more effectively, then you’re effectively going backwards yourself. So, I think it was a good lesson for us to see what other people are capable of and how we do that.”

Houldey said McLaren intends to keep developing its 2026 challenger late into the season rather than switch focus to 2027 early, because he feels the lessons the team can learn still apply to the 2027 project, even if McLaren is planning to change key elements of its car design such as its wheelbase and suspension geometry.

“We expect the next few races to be bringing some major parts, and we expect to do that quite late on into the season as well,” he revealed. “We’re certainly not stopping development on 2026 because we know that whatever we take from 2026 into 2027, that learning will carry over.

“Even if our car might get a little bit longer, even if conceptually the suspension might change, everything that we’re learning this year is very much relevant for next year. So, we’re very keen to keep developing the car for as long as we possibly can.”

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– The Motorsport.com Team