On the surface, McLaren's latest display of corporate sporting ambition seems somewhat unusual. Drifting away from the principles of their racing-obsessed founder, Bruce McLaren might have raised an eyebrow at the papaya-clad team expanding into golf equipment, with Justin Rose as their top signing, posing alongside Lando Norris—an avid golfer—at a lavish Florida launch on Wednesday.
Yet group CEO Zak Brown has overseen remarkable growth over the past six years. In 2020, McLaren Racing was valued at £560 million. By last September, Forbes estimated the team alone was worth approximately £4 billion, trailing only Mercedes and Ferrari in F1 terms. With over 50 sponsors, most prominently displayed on the reigning world champions' car, and despite a turbulent start to the Formula 1 season, they remain hungry for more.
“I think we can have a good season, even if we're not where we want to be right now,” Norris said during the enforced spring break. “Although we haven't started the season where we want to be, we still want to push hard for the championship.”
Formula 1 returns this weekend in Miami after a five-week hiatus, following the cancellation of races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. In many ways, it feels like the 2026 campaign is starting now. Regulation tweaks made during the break—aimed at promoting flat-out driving in qualifying and reducing dramatic in-race closing speeds to avoid massive crashes like Ollie Bearman's in Japan—will debut in the intense environment of a sprint weekend at the fifth edition of the temporary 19-turn street circuit around the 60,000-capacity Hard Rock Stadium, which houses the paddock. Due to new challenges and protocols, the sole practice session on Friday has been extended by half an hour.
The big question remains: how much have the main contenders closed the gap to frontrunners Mercedes? If at all?
“It's too impossible to compare,” Norris said when asked about driving previous generations of cars versus the 2026 machines. “If you ask me now, do I still enjoy the older cars more? Yes. I find it hard for anyone to say they enjoy driving these cars as much as previous generations... I think it's obviously possible that someone else could feel that way. But it's still our job to adapt to these cars we have now. They're good in different ways. They should be getting better over time. It's tough to go that much further, honestly. I think when you start to cover up some problems you also reveal other issues, so there's only so much you can do with the rules that you have to keep things. I think we would all love more in the direction that they've gone, but some of those are more hardware, bigger things. Those are hard things to change in the middle of a season when you have one team dominating and doing very well and other teams struggling. So it's difficult from that end to do a lot more but they've moved things in the right direction, especially for qualifying. The race really isn't going to be that different. Some things are not going to change that much. Qualifying should be a bit more flat-out qualifying style laps, which is a nice thing, it's what we wanted as drivers.”
McLaren, despite their uninspiring start to the title defense, remain notably upbeat. Oscar Piastri failed to start his home race in Melbourne. Both Norris and Piastri failed to start in China. Norris, the reigning world champion, has yet to register a podium and already trails championship leader Kimi Antonelli by 47 points.
Yet they were remarkably open last week, inviting The Independent and other media to their state-of-the-art Woking headquarters. Everyone from the academy boss and chief designer to the star drivers and Brown participated in press conferences. But it was team principal Andrea Stella who revealed why McLaren remains unperturbed by their poor start: they are set to bring a “completely new car” to Miami and beyond.
“That was always the idea,” said the Italian. “Especially from an aerodynamic upgrades point of view... so we can keep up with this plan. Obviously, the fact that the calendar has been changed helped. I'm sure it helped all the other teams, who could work more streamlined towards upgrading the car rather than being busy with racing. But I could say overall that, across Miami and next race Canada, we will see an entirely new MCL40. I would like to stress that this is what I would expect of most of our competitors so it is not necessarily going to be a shift in the pecking order... it will be effectively just a check who has been able to add more performance within the same time frame.”
Despite Stella playing it down, McLaren offers the most exciting route to a title battle beyond Antonelli and George Russell's intra-team fight. Unlike Ferrari and Red Bull's in-house projects, they use a Mercedes engine—clearly the best on the grid—and have the know-how from recent constructors' triumphs. Miami thus represents a line in the sand: judge their season from now.
Of course, we won't know more until the cars are unveiled for the first time before FP1 on Friday. Mercedes has set an impressive early benchmark in this new era, but McLaren is hopeful they can be caught. Their performance technical director, Mark Temple, said as much a fortnight ago on the F1 Nation podcast: “Absolutely they are beatable. Hopefully, we can be the ones who are able to beat them. They're certainly not invincible, that's for sure.”
If McLaren does not reduce the deficit to Mercedes in Miami, Norris can bid farewell to a potential title defense. But if the gap has closed, even slightly, the performance curve should be heading in a papaya direction. Norris memorably claimed his first F1 victory in Miami two years ago; a return to the top this weekend would raise the stakes at the front of the grid in these intriguing early stages of F1's new chapter.
