McLaren have been ‘bold’ with ‘innovative’ new car for 2025

Constructors’ champions McLaren have not been conservative with their car development for 2025, according to Zak Brown.

The McLaren Racing CEO said “there’s a lot of innovation” on the team’s new MCL39, which first ran at Silverstone two weeks ago.

“We definitely didn’t put it away after Abu Dhabi and polish it and just roll it out here,” said Brown. “It has a lot of innovation on it.”

Speaking during the first day of pre-season testing at the Bahrain International Circuit, Brown said the team was encouraged by the first signs from the MCL39.

“What I’m liking is the car is doing what we thought it would do,” he said. “Some of the innovations were bold so we needed to make sure they were going to work and not be issues.

“So we’re kind of ticking off the ‘yes that works’, ‘yes that’s going according to plan’. It’s way too early to see what the grid looks like but what we’re doing is getting through our run plan, it’s going according to plan, so I’m very happy with that.”

Four teams won multiple races last year. With a significant overhaul of F1’s technical regulations coming next year, Brown expects some teams to abandon work on their current cars early on. However he said McLaren are already hard at work on their 2026 car.

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“Probably, some teams maybe [won’t] put as much effort into ’25 because they don’t think they have a chance and therefore double down on ’26,” he said. “So that’ll be interesting to see what that looks like in ’26.

“Then you have ourselves and I’m sure many others [who are thinking] before we think about ’26, let’s make sure we optimise ’25 because we have a chance. So we are working on both.

“Our ’26 car has been in the wind tunnel, our ’25 car, they kind of bounce back and forth. So we’re working on both.

“Then I think we’ve got to see how we start the season, how much development do we think we have left and then kind of react accordingly as to how we balance our resources.”