For the first time in more than a quarter of a century McLaren is no longer a hunter. In 2025 it’s being hunted for the constructors world championship.
Watch every qualifying session and race in the 2025 FIA Formula One World Championship™, LIVE in 4K with no ad-breaks during racing. New to Kayo? Get your first month for just $1. Limited time offer.
Its 2024 title broke the longest drought in its decorated history — 26 seasons without the most prestigious teams trophy in world motorsport.
In the intervening years it had to watch arch rival Ferrari clean up eight times along with Renault, the upstart Brawn GP and even former works partner Mercedes, which set new records for title success.
Red Bull Racing, which didn’t exist last time McLaren topped the standings, managed to win six world titles while Woking fumbled in vain pursuit of glory.
But in 2024 the wait was finally over. Powered by Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, the Kiwi-founded British team was on top of the world again.
It was a gritty season that capped off years of hard graft to shake itself free from what had appeared to be an interminable slump.
McLaren started the year off the pace while Red Bull Racing sprinted away to an early lead. Once it finally got itself the car to fight, both team and driver were too error prone to take more than a few tentative steps towards the top.
But just as it had been doing since 2023, McLaren managed to pull off what neither Red Bull Racing not eventual title rival Ferrari could do.
It delivered a pipeline of upgrades that never once failed to fire.
The car just kept getting better and better until its triumph in Abu Dhabi was inevitable.
The celebrations were well deserved and hard earned.
But now comes the really hard part.
Now McLaren has to do it all again, and this time it’ll have one arm tied behind its back.
Piastri preparing for F1 title fight | 00:54
F1’S EQUALISATION RULES WILL HOLD McLAREN BACK
It’s tempting to believe that McLaren can simply continue on its roll. After all, it’s been the most effective team at car development for the last 24 months, rising from the back of the grid to the top of the pile. Why should we believe things will get tougher from here?
Once upon time all that might have made sense, but in 2025 the Formula 1 regulations are designed to prevent runaway leaders from doubling down on their advantages.
The cost cap is one element. Moneyed teams can no longer outspend their rivals to success. Everyone is limited to the same US$140.4 million ($226.3 million) per season.
Having good ideas is therefore more important than how many ideas you can come up with.
But that’s especially true owing to F1’s development restrictions.
Like the AFL draft, the teams lowest in the constructors championship are allowed the most time in the wind tunnel and using their computer simulation tools.
The most successful teams — and McLaren is the most successful among them — get the least.
There’s a formula used to calculate the development sliding scale. The sporting regulations vary wind tunnel time based on the team that finishes seventh in the constructors championship. The below table realigns the allowance based on the championship leader for simplicity.
Wind tunnel restrictions
1. McLaren: 100.0 per cent (672 wind tunnel runs, 4200 CFD simulations in six months)
2. Ferrari: 107.1 per cent
3. Red Bull Racing: 114.3 per cent
4. Mercedes: 121.4 per cent
5. Aston Martin: 128.6 per cent
6. Alpine: 135.7 per cent
7. Haas: 142.9 per cent
8. Racing Bulls: 150.0 per cent
9. Williams: 157.1 per cent
10. Sauber: 164.3 per cent (1104 wind tunnel runs, 6900 CFD simulations)
The restrictions are reassessed every six months. The current allocations came into effect on 1 January 2025. They will expire on 30 June later this year.
That means that for the opening phase of the season Ferrari will have access to 48 more runs in the wind tunnel and 300 more CFD simulations.
Red Bull Racing will have 96 more runs and 600 more simulations.
The budget cap means teams can’t just hope new parts will work; they have to be sure if they’re going to commit precious dollars to their manufacture. It means every run in the wind tunnel counts — and means every minute in the wind tunnel you don’t have will be a disadvantage.
If McLaren wants to maintain or even extend the advantage it developed last season, it will have to do so along a much narrower path than it strode last year.
Marc Marquez wins Thai Moto GP | 00:54
McLAREN’S PLAN TO BEAT THE RULES
The team has a plan to navigate that path. It’s going to do it by pushing harder than it ever has before.
“This car is innovative,” team principal Andrea Stella said at the launch of the MCL39, per The Race. “Pretty much every fundamental component of the layout has been subject to some innovation in order to gain — sometimes not only by marginal gains — some technical opportunities for development.
“Most of the time these serve the purpose of aerodynamic requirements or in some other cases for mechanical grip.”
“In reality pretty much from the front wing to the gearbox, crash structure — everything — has been subject to optimisation, sometimes incrementally, sometimes actually quite substantially.”
It’s a strategy that’s worked well for McLaren over the past two seasons and in particular its title-winning year.
The team started 2024 in the mix but undercooked relative to the competition and where it had hoped to be.
But by the Miami Grand Prix in May, the sixth round of the season, it had delivered the upgrade package it needed to turn its campaign around, putting it on a title-winning trajectory.
This year it hopes — and pre-season testing has suggested — it will start from a more competitive position, meaning any early gains could have it take a decisive step ahead of the pack.
“We have not changed the approach or the rate of development with a front loading of our developments,” Stella said.
“We’re just going as fast as possible because we’re very aware that last season, even if it’s been a successful season, the margins we have from a performance point of view meant we needed to be aggressive with the car and try to cash in as much performance as possible.
“I think those margins were so small, that considering the development other teams would have had, had we not gone as fast as possible in terms of development, we might very quickly lose any advantage that we had.
“Definitely we kept full gas in terms of development, and we will see if we have been able to develop more than our competitors from the 2024 to 2025 car.”
There’s a crucial reason to believe McLaren’s all-guns-blazing approach could be the right one.
While it will start this year hamstrung by F1’s development equalisation measures, the fundamentals of the “aggressive” car that formally debut in Australia next weekend will have been designed with more freedom.
On 1 July last year McLaren was still a distant third in the constructors championship behind leader Red Bull Racing and the fading Ferrari.
It means it had a 14.3 per cent development allowance advantage over RBR and a 7.2 boost relative to Ferrari during the most important months designing this year’s car.
It’s used that extra allowance to come up with a prototype it thinks pushes the boundaries enough to maintain a competitive advantage over rivals that appear to have kept the status quo with their new cars.
Piastri clipped in rare testing incident | 01:09
A SHORT VIEW BACK TO THE PAST
It’s not just for 2025 that McLaren’s choices are critical.
Woking couldn’t have chosen a more difficult moment for its competitiveness to peak. Dynasties are more easily built during stable regulations, but McLaren has arrived on the scene in time for the last season under this rule set.
From 2026 both the chassis and the power units regulations are changing in what some are billing the biggest shake-up in the sport’s history.
If McLaren wants to capitalise on its golden era — on having two leading drivers and the right combination of staff working in just the right way — it will have to nail both this year’s car as well as next year’s rules.
Some teams are already suggesting they’ll switch attention fully to 2026 as soon as possible this year.
“We’ve just tried to go as fast as possible in terms of developing the car, which means there will be some updates during the early races of the season,” Stella said, though he added: “But this would have been the same even without a 2026 change of regulations looming ahead.”
The logical decision is to abandon this year’s car sooner rather than later, with long-term success the possible reward.
But that’s always easier said than done.
If this new McLaren still has an institutional memory, the lessons of 2008–09 will be seared indelibly into it.
The 2008 season was a landmark year for the team. It hadn’t won the teams title since 1998 or the drivers crown since 1999. It had been publicly beaten up over the so-called ‘spygate’ scandal that saw it thrown out of the 2007 championship and fined US$100 million for stealing Ferrari intellectual property.
But in the final year of that set of rules the team built the MP4-23, a car capable of winning both championships.
The year boiled down to a straight fight between McLaren and Ferrari and between respective drivers Lewis Hamilton and Felipe Massa.
Both teams pushed their development programs hard, this being an era long before the cost cap or wind tunnel restrictions. Neither wanted to lose to the old enemy.
In the end the chocolates were split. Ferrari won the constructors championship, while Hamilton pipped Massa to the title by a single point in the final race.
But their respective celebrations would be short-lived. The 2009 season was just around the corner, and both grandees found themselves painfully underprepared.
After eight rounds Ferrari was fourth with just 26 points, while McLaren languished in sixth with only 13 points.
Massive spending eventually hauled both teams back to respectability. Hamilton won twice, in Hungary and Singapore, while Ferrari triumphed in Belgium.
By the end of the season just a point separated them, but both were more than 100 points behind fairytale winner Brawn.
Both teams spent the ensuing years being beaten by Red Bull Racing and Mercedes and then Red Bull Racing again. It took until last year for McLaren to break the cycle that started 15 years ago.
That’s what’s at stake this season.
It’s not just its 2024 title defence. It’s not just the validation of its bold design decisions this year.
If McLaren gets this year right, it could win at least one championship and set itself up for several more in the new rules era.
But to do that it needs to have got this car right, got its development plan right and get the timing of its 2026 switch right.
Get it wrong, however, and it could risk letting its golden age slip away.
Discussion about this post