Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris will be able to stress less about team orders in 2026 when McLaren simplifies its internal racing rules, says team boss Andrea Stella.
Norris beat Piastri to the world championship last year in a close title fight punctuated by several interventions from the team in the name of sporting fairness and competitive neutrality.
McLaren controversially forced Piastri to hand Norris second place at the Italian Grand Prix after a slow pit stop, but Norris wasn’t penalised during the Singapore Grand Prix for hitting his teammate on the opening lap to take third place, though it later applied an undisclosed internal punishment before Piastri was deemed at fault for causing a first-turn pileup in the sprint race in Austin.
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Fairness was also a factor in the team’s disastrous decision not to pit during the early safety car in Qatar, costing Piastri what should have been an easy victory and incidentally hurting his title chances.
The team insisted that a complex series of precedents was a price it was willing to pay to avoid having to pick one driver as its number one, and speaking ahead of next week’s closed-doors pre-season test in Barcelona, team principal Stella doubled down on that position.
“Like anything that we approach at McLaren, we go through a thorough process of review such that we can see where the opportunities are to improve,” he said. “This was the same for what we call the racing principles and the way we go racing and internal competition.
“We got quite a lot of feedback already during the season last year. We had conversations after the season, and we are having conversations pretty much as we speak now.
“All this has led us to reaffirm fundamentally that the concepts of fairness, integrity, equal opportunities, sportsmanship — they are all fundamental for the team, for Lando and for Oscar.
“They are reaffirmed. They are confirmed and consolidated, if anything.”
But the team boss hinted that there would be fewer rules governing the way his drivers battled on track this season.
“At the same time, we all acknowledge that the volume of work required, for instance, for the team and for some extent even for the drivers related to internal competition was important. Therefore, any attempt we can make to make this going racing together just simpler to some extent will be welcome,” he said.
“It will be, in reality, a matter of finetuning, because once we reviewed what we have done, in most of the cases we said, ‘That’s exactly what we would still do again’.
“But we found a few opportunities in which we can streamline the way in which we operate collectively — like I said, reaffirming, though, the fundamental principles that we have adopted in the past.”
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McLaren has made a virtue of its approach to racing, priding itself on its ability to manage two equally talented title-calibre drivers without blowing up the team.
The philosophy saw it dominate the constructors championship last year, though Max Verstappen got to within two points of pinching the drivers title from Norris at the final race of the season at the end of a herculean comeback from the then reigning four-time champion.
Stella said the double championship victory — the team’s first since 1998 — encouraged the team to stick with its approach.
“We will keep racing the McLaren way. If we have been able to achieve success in 2024 and then in 2025, what has added extra value to what we have achieved is the way in which we have achieved it in such a collaborative, supportive, cohesive way together with our drivers.
“I was actually coming straight from a meeting with Oscar, and before I was having lunch with Lando. The 2026 season is already fully on, even in terms of how much the drivers are engaged.
“I was particularly pleased to see how energetic, proactive, full of ideas but also full of support for the way we have gone racing, the McLaren way, in the past. That’s the perspective of going into 2026 racing from a team point of view.”
McLaren will start 2026 defending both titles but without the benefit of stable rules on which to build, with sweeping regulation changes coming into effect just at the time the F1 grandee should have been building towards dynastic success.
The rule changes affect both chassis and power unit, leaving no meaningful carry-over between seasons.
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The power unit is expected to be far more influential in performance this year, and though Mercedes is rumoured to be ahead of the game — not least owing to the ongoing compression ratio row — nothing is certain for the customer McLaren team.
Stella said his team was trying not to think of itself as the defending champion given the lack of continuity between campaigns.
“We are champions, but we don’t carry being champions into 2026,” he said. “Everyone will start from the starting blocks, everyone will start from zero.
“Our internal narrative is anything we will achieve, we will have to deserve it and we will have to earn it on the ground. That’s our mindset. That’s our philosophy.
“I can see that the team enters 2026 in terms of competencies, capabilities, organisation, culture [that are], if anything, in the strongest position that I have witnessed since I’ve been team principal.
“Wherever we are in testing or race 1, we remain very confident that the wealth of capabilities, competencies and the way we use them, thanks to our organisation and culture, will be a success factor in the long term.”
Stella revealed that the build for the 2026 car is on schedule, with dyno testing underway in Austria before the team heads to Barcelona for the first pre-season test next week.
The test runs from Monday to Friday, but each team can participate for only three of those five days.
McLaren will not run on day 1 and is unlikely to run on day 2, having instead preferred to maximise development time before putting its car on the track.
Though Stella claimed the car would receive few upgrades between the first test and the opening grand prix in Melbourne — reminiscent of the team’s upgrade approach over the last two seasons — he said McLaren had been “ambitious” with its design.
Chief designer Rob Marshall said that though the regulation shake-up could rearrange the pecking order, he had faith that the same staff that delivered the last two constructors championships could come up trumps again.
“Built-in advantages have gone, have been wiped clear,” he said. “But we’ve still got the same people and tools doing it.
“You hope our approach is consistent and we go back in the same way, and hopefully we get similar or the same results.”
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