‘Surreal’ first look at McLaren; ‘incredibly painful’ F1 call explained — What we learned

Lando Norris has enjoyed a “surreal” debut in the championship No. 1 car on McLaren’s first day of pre-season testing.

The constructors championship winner waited until the third day of F1’s opening secret test in Barcelona to hit the track, preferring to maximise development time away from the circuit for a car it says will receive few upgrades before the opening race in Melbourne in March.

Norris was given exclusive use for the MCL40’s first kilometres, with teammate Oscar Piastri set to take control of the new car on Thursday.

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“It felt great to be back on track and see the No. 1 on the car, which is a surreal moment for me,” said Norris, the first McLaren driver to race with the championship number since Jenson Button brought it with him from Brawn in 2010.

“It was a productive and positive first day. Our aim was to gain an initial understanding of the new car, check that all systems work, and gather some baseline data for the engineers.

“With any regulation change, it takes time to figure everything out, but I am feeling good about how the day went, and I’m looking forward to getting more laps in on Friday.”

McLaren — painted in a test-special black livery before its full paint scheme is revealed next week — hit the track at around 11am, though the day’s first two hours of running were heavily disrupted by red flags when both Haas and Audi suffered stoppages.

Haas stopped again later in the day, though reports suggest neither of its issues was related to its Ferrari engine.

Teething troubles continue for Audi, however, with hydraulics issues believed to have been the culprit that restricted the rebranded Sauber team and its new power unit to relatively few laps.

Mercedes, meanwhile, had no such issues. The works team completed an impressive 183 laps, with Andrea Kimi Antonelli and George Russell splitting the load.

Mileage by team, day 3

1. Mercedes: 183 laps (852.2 kilometres)

2. Alpine-Mercedes: 125 laps (582.1 kilometres)

3. Racing Bulls-RBPT: 120 laps (558.8 kilometres)

4. McLaren-Mercedes: 76 laps (353.9 kilometres)

5. Audi: 68 laps (316.7 kilometres)

6. Haas-Ferrari: 42 laps (195.6 kilometres)

No times are being published, with media and fans still banned from attending the test, but reports suggest the Mercedes drivers topped the time sheet too, with Antonelli’s quickest lap setting the bar at 1 minute 17.362 seconds — though lap times are largely meaningless so early in a nine-day testing campaign.

Red Bull Racing opted to sit out the day after Isack Hadjar crashed late on Tuesday in the wet. The team has only one testing day remaining, however, and can choose whether to use it on Thursday or Friday.

Ferrari also skipped the day, as did power unit customer Cadillac. The brand-new team hasn’t run since declaring a need to ‘debug’ its car after completing a modest 44 laps on Monday.

Aston Martin had already confirmed it won’t be ready to run until Thursday at the earliest, while Williams is skipping the entire week.

WILLIAMS EXPLAINS CAR DELAY

Williams principal James Vowles has opened up on the “incredibly painful” decision not to attend the Barcelona test, justifying it as necessary to give the team a chance to be competitive early in the season.

Williams is the only team to have confirmed it will not appear in Barcelona at all, giving up three of a maximum nine days of testing and putting itself on the back foot amid the biggest regulation changes in generations.

Explaining the delay, Vowles said the new rules had stress tested the team’s back-office processes, even after he had worked to revolutionise the way Grove worked after ascending to the top job.

Vowles joined the team in 2023 and was shocked to discover the historically underfunded constructor was using a single Excel spreadsheet to manage its entire development process.

Transitioning from that rudimentary method to a purpose-built system was part of the reason the team struggled in 2024, but it was also credited with its rebound last year.

The team boss explained, however, that the all-new rules had pushed the team’s processes beyond their limits for 2026.

“The car this year that we’ve built … is about three times more complicated than anything we have put through our business beforehand,” he said, per Racer.

“We started falling a little bit behind and late on parts, and there’s compromises you can make as a result of it.

“We have absolutely pushed the boundaries of what we’re doing in certain areas, and one of those is in certain corresponding tests that go with it, but those were only, I would say, a blip in the grand scheme of things.

“They are one item out of quite a few that were pushing us absolutely beyond the limit of what we can achieve in the space of time that we have available to us.”

Though he wouldn’t confirm it, Vowles appeared to hint at Williams having failed a crash test — Racer reported it related to the car’s nose box — earlier in its development program, though he said the car had “passed all necessary crash tests” before Barcelona.

Rumours suggest Williams was forced to strengthen its designs as a result of the failure, adding weight in the process, though Vowles said it was impossible to know how much the car will weigh before it’s fully assembled to hit the track.

The FIA reduced minimum weight by 30 kilograms this year. Given the sweeping rule changes, most teams are expected to start the season overweight.

The delay is a blow for Williams given it made a virtue of abandoning development on last year’s car early to devote maximum resources to 2026, when it hopes it will take a step up the grid.

Vowles argued that Williams’s absence from the first test doesn’t negate that strategy but rather proves that his team is pushing hard on development.

“It’s more of an output [problem] than anything else — of pushing not just the boundaries of design but the boundaries of just simply how many components can be pushed through the factory in a very short space of time,” he continued.

“If we print the car in February last year, it’s way too early — you leave too much performance on the table.

“What you’re seeing is an outcome for making sure we’re making aggressive decisions to keep as much performance on the car as possible.”

Vowles said the team theoretically could have run in Barcelona but that it would have heavily compromised its pool of spare parts for both Bahrain tests and the opening grands prix of the season.

In Williams’s favour is that it buys both its power unit and its gearbox from Mercedes, and the works team is proving that both are reliable, eliminating some potential pressure points when the car does eventually get a run in Bahrain.

But with almost every other team racking up hundreds of kilometres, Williams will have a mountain of work to do at the final two tests to start the season at level pegging.

MERCEDES DOMINATES RELIABILITY STAKES

While testing so far has looked little like the failure-fest that was the 2014 pre-season, when the turbo-hybrid power unit was first introduced, there is one thing that feels eerily reminiscent of that year.

Mercedes is running rings around the competition.

The works team setting the fastest time of the test so far is neither here nor there. The quickest times have been well off the pace set at last year’s grand prix in Barcelona, and no team is pushing for performance so early in the pre-season.

But even from the team’s private shakedown at Silverstone, Mercedes has looked bulletproof.

It’s the only team to have completed two days of more than 100 laps — and in fact both its days so far have comprised more than 150 laps apiece.

Its cumulative total mileage is more than 1.5 times the next-best team — impressive and perhaps foreboding in equal measure.

Cumulative mileage by team, day 3

1. Mercedes: 334 laps (1555.4 kilometres)

2. Racing Bulls-RBPT: 208 laps (968.7 kilometres)

3. Haas-Ferrari: 196 laps (912.8 kilometres)

4. Red Bull Racing: 186 laps (866.2 kilometres)

5. Alpine-Mercedes: 185 laps (861.5 kilometres)

6. Ferrari: 121 laps (563.5 kilometres)

7. Audi: 95 laps (442.4 kilometres)

8. McLaren-Mercedes: 76 laps (353.9 kilometres)*

9. Cadillac-Ferrari: 44 laps (204.9 kilometres)*

10. Williams-Mercedes: 0 laps (0.0 kilometres)

11. Aston Martin-Honda: 0 laps (0.0 kilometres)

*McLaren and Cadillac have run only one day apiece.

That same vibe is felt in the cumulative mileage for power units, with Mercedes fast approaching the 3000-kilometre mark.

Cumulative mileage by power unit, day 3

1. Mercedes: 595 laps (2770.9 kilometres)

2. Red Bull Powertrains: 394 laps (1834.9 kilometres)

3. Ferrari: 361 laps (1681.2 kilometres)

4. Audi: 95 laps (442.4 kilometres)

5. Honda: 0 laps (0.0 kilometres)

Of course Mercedes has three teams active at this test, as does Ferrari — although one of Ferrari’s customers, the new Cadillac team, has completed little running.

Worth noting, however, is that Red Bull Powertrains has just two teams in the mix and is, on a per-team basis, neck and neck with Mercedes in terms of laps completed.

Audi, meanwhile, has yet to put 100 laps on its power unit after another tough day. Though it completed more than double the 27 laps from day 1, its 68-lap tally on its follow-up outing, curtailed by suspected hydraulics problems, has left it severely down on mileage.

Drive-train problems were always going to be an issue considering the brand-new power unit, and discovering problems is precisely what testing is for. But given Audi powers only its own team, it’s going to end the Barcelona test lacking the sort of knowledge other multiple-team engine manufacturers will have accumulated.

Haas, meanwhile, completed a day-low 42 laps after twice being halted by technical problems, the second of which team principal Ayao Komatsu admitted was “a bit more serious”.

But Komatsu was heartened by how much better the car was otherwise running compared to Monday — when it completed a day-high 154 laps — that he remained optimistic the team was in a good place.

WHAT’S NEXT?

McLaren will be on track on Thursday with Oscar Piastri. After skipping the opening two days, the team is effectively obliged to run for the last two days if it wants to maximise its three-out-of-five testing allocation in Barcelona.

Ferrari, which so far has run only in the wet on Tuesday, is in the same boat, as is its customer Cadillac team, which hasn’t run since Monday.

Aston Martin will hit the track if its car is ready — though the Adrian Newey-led team said earlier this week it would hit the track on Thursday at the earliest, suggesting a reasonable chance the car’s debut will be pushed back.

Mercedes, Red Bull Racing, Racing Bulls, Haas, Audi and Alpine have all used up two of their maximum three days and are free to choose whether to complete their programs on Thursday or Friday.