Reigning World Champion McLaren says it is planning to bring an entirely new car across the upcoming North American rounds, as it bids to reignite its 2026 season.

McLaren, World Champions in 2024 and 2025, started the campaign slowly, emerging third-best in Australia, before a disastrous event in China, in which both MCL40s failed to start due to separate electrical issues.

The squad enjoyed an upturn in performance in Japan, with Oscar Piastri leading the first stint of the race before finishing second, as Mercedes maintained its winning start to 2026.

McLaren is third in the championship, already 89 points behind Mercedes, but sizable revisions are expected for the MCL40 when Formula 1 returns to Miami next weekend.

“In our intent, there was always the idea to deliver a completely new car, especially from an aerodynamic upgrades point of view for the North American races,” McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella said Wednesday. “So we could keep up with this plan. Obviously, the fact that the calendar has been changed sort of helped a little bit, like I'm sure helped all the other teams that could work more streamlined towards upgrading the car rather than being busy with racing.

“But I could say overall that across Miami and Canada, we will see an entirely new MCL40. Again, I would like to stress that this is what I would expect of most of our competitors. So not necessarily is going to be a shift in the packing order.

“It will be effectively just a check who has been able to add more performance within the same time frame. And we also have some performance to recover if we look at Mercedes and to some extent Ferrari as well.

“So hopefully we should be able to see a slightly more competitive MCL40 in Miami and then in Canada, considering that the last race was already a decent competitive performance in Japan. So we definitely look forward to the next race.”

McLaren claimed victory in Miami in 2024 – which was the maiden win for Lando Norris – and in 2025, with Piastri triumphing ahead of Norris.