Craig ScarboroughIn the first of our-pre-season car-by-car reviews, Motorsport.tech has split the field up and taken a look at each car and assesses its design and the teams’ situation, as the cars emerge from testing for the first Grand Prix of the 2026 season.
McLaren Mercedes MCL40
The current world champions McLaren seemed to run throughout testing somewhat under the radar, with very little in the way of headlines for the cars features or performance.
Indeed the MCL40 appeared in its first runs in much the same specification as it completed the final day in Bahrain’s second test.
This was McLaren’s stated objective and perhaps suggests an underlying confidence in its programme, approaching what will be a very long season with forethought and discipline.
This approach applies not just to the teams’ operations, but also the car’s design. Compared to the headline grabbing innovations of its rivals, the MCL40 is no less interesting.
Being the champion constructor from 2024 and through 2025, this has left the team with less aero testing time and that will have had an effect of how radical the team can go.
Mechanically the car leads with its suspension set up, which provided the team with its tyre management advantage through the past two seasons.
While some feel it was the car’s anti-dive front suspension that rewarded them, it was in fact less visible.
As the lower wishbone was split into two separate legs and it was the geometric effect of the pivoting of these two elements that altered the front wheels attitude to the track, that gave the tyres a far easier time.
Many teams have followed this multilink approach to the lower front suspension, but McLaren already have a year of experience in running this.
It was this set up that pained Lando Norris early in the season, as the steering feel was not there for him, while the revised geometry subsequently robbed Oscar Piastri of the feel he had in the early season car.
Other teams may have similar issues as their multilink set ups prove to be tricky to perfect.
McLaren continue to run an extreme level of inclination to the front ‘wishbone’ element.
This is often termed anti-dive, but this is less of an accurate term given the inclination of both wishbone and the tiny amount of suspension travel.
This solution is largely aerodynamically driven. Other teams have opted to run the rear leg of the upper wishbone further rearwards for an aero downwash towards the floor.
McLaren have the lower rearward leg in this position, placing it closer to the floors leading edge.
The Woking team were also one of the teams that switched to front pullrod with the 2022 rules, it has reverted back to pushrod for the new car.
Not a major performance factor, as the new rules merely favour this packaging of the rod in amongst the suspension arms, chassis and brake ducts.
Also, at the front the car goes it own direction on aero, with a high narrow nose. Other teams opting for a larger lower nose, or even the deep chinned version seen on the Aston Martin or Audi.
Being mounted so high from the front wing, the Active aero linkages are more evident on the McL40 than those hidden under rivals’ lower noses.
Moving towards the front wing, there is a noticeable curve to the front profile and trailing edges of the flaps.
While the endplates take the very curved 3D shape to encourage vortices to spill off the top edge to manage the front tyre wake interaction with the rest of the car.
McLaren neatly put the front tyre temperature sensor in the trailing edge of the endplate’s strake.
Is around the mid-section that McLaren aero philosophy appears to be most significant. The wakeboards aren’t the same complex up/outwash design of most teams, rather a simple upper board, allowing the surfaces lower down to be more complex and interact with the floor.
The floor towards its leading edge is left exposed by the huge undercut of the sidepods, in fact the bare monocoque side is visible below the sidepod fronts almost all the way to the fuel tank area.
This amount of undercut is really focussing on directing more air to the diffuser, rather than loading the floor edge, which leaves the top surface of the sidepods with less of a slide downwards to the rear.
It’s notable that the sidepods and engine cover are left smooth and the cooling outlet largely formed by the coke bottle exit aimed through the middle of the rear wing.
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No doubt other variations of louvers and openings allowing a smaller tail exit will be tried. Overall, the sidepods are relatively small and the correspondingly larger roll hoop inlet is evident.
Similar to Ferrari, the enforced shark fin size demanded by the new rules, has led to a serrated top surface. This breaks up the large vortex that forms along the top edge when the car is in corners, allowing better airflow to the rear wing.
There remains the long-standing partnership with Mercedes for the powertrain, The Mercedes V6 has always been notably well packaged for a neat and slim installation.
McLaren will gain from the potential performance advantage from the compression ratio ‘trick’, until mid-season.
Mating their own gearbox casing and rear suspension to allow them more control over the car’s end to end design.
As with many teams, the rear wing endplate is shaped and thickened locally to function with the airflows coming up off the rear suspension and brake duct bodywork, rather than being a uniform thickness throughout.
McLaren also employ a rear impact structure flap, to work with the diffuser’s upwash and connect it to the rear wing air flow.
Everything on the MCL40 seems sensible and well though through, there’s no drama in the design and this may reflect well on the team’s results in the first races.
Of course, should the more radical designs of its rivals find more performance, McLaren may have to ramp up its design, which may be tricky given the aero testing restrictions is lives under for the first part of the season.
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Red Bull – Ford Red Bull Powertrains RB22
It’s been quite a journey for the Red Bull design team over the past year.
With aero correlation problems becoming apparent, as well the departure of Adrian Newey and the installation of Laurent Mekies as the Team Principal, a man who its also hugely experienced as an engineer.
This season sees the team’s growing with confidence from the second half of 2025 under Mekies revised technical approach but also comes with the challenge of running its own power unit programme, with Ford’s support.
The exact origins of the RB22s design aren’t clear, the car would have seen some of Newey’s input, either directly or through his influence.
But, clearly at some point the new Design team took full control and the car shows several directions quite different to other teams.
Starting at the front the Bahrain test2 update showed a new front wing profile, with the distinct step in the leading-edge shape, while the endplates also formed a complex 3D shape, as described on the McLaren.
These were augmented with the small outwash flap on the wing’s footplate.
More conventional is the nose shape, wide flat tipped and incorporating a hole in its top surface to adjust the front wing flap angle with a single tool, many teams have adopted this approach.
One Red Bull/Newey feature is the “AA” section, this is where the nose usually meets the chassis.
It has to meet specific cross-sectional dimensions, but Red Bull have pushed the cockpit rearwards to allow the cross section to also sit further rearward, allowing for a slimmer shape to be formed in between the front wheels.
The RB22 also goes against fashion with the front suspension geometry, the inclination of the wishbones is almost non-existent, there’s no down washing ‘anti dive’ here, so Red Bull are clearly chasing other concerns with aerodynamics.
However, they do appear to have taken the lower multilink design onboard, albeit with a more conventional location for the steering rack compared to McLaren. But they have also switched back to front pushrod.
Whilst talking about the suspension, one key part of it are the wheels.
After four years of a spec wheel and wheel fairing, the 2026 rules allow teams to design their own wheels and the outer rim fairing.
The Milton Keynes team has partnered with wheel and former F1 aspirant, Fondmetal.
As no airflow or brake heat is allowed out through the wheel, they have taken the unusual step of creating a closed wheel face, there are no spokes, no holes, just a flat face.
One can assume they are chasing structural efficiencies with the design, either stiffer or lighter than a conventional spoked wheel.
Sister team VCarb also use this wheel and similar versions are employed by other teams.
Again, it’s the mid-section of the car that separates this car from its rivals, as the second Bahrain test saw the real RB22 aero revealed for the first time.
In the first test, the car sported flat-sided sidepods and a simple t-tray splitter. This entire area was revised for test week 2, to work the front and rear of the floor with a combination of outwash and a long sidepod undercut.
At the front of the floor, outwash is creating with the splitter, bib and floor leading edge teeth. This loads the front edge of the floor to create forward biased downforce.
It also hides a secret floor inlet between the floor teeth and t-tray, which feeds the bulk of the underfloor with airflow unobstructed by the outwash set up of teeth etc.
Then the over floor airflow is aided by an undercut to the sidepods which routes airflow towards the diffuser’s slot for more rear biased downforce.
Helping the compact sidepod design is a wholly revised cooling system. The previous generations of Red Bull’s housed the combustion engine cooling in the sidepods, along with a large intercooler in the rear of each sidepod.
Then above the engine the low temperature coolers for the hybrid systems and gearbox.
The use of the bulky air-to-air intercoolers in the sidepods would have prevented the slim RB22 sidepod concept, so the intercoolers are merged into one unit, now mounted above the engine, displacing the hybrid coolers to the righthand sidepod.
Venting the heated air is split between the relatively large oval-shaped coke bottle exit and an opening/louver on the flank of the engine cover.
Little has been seen of the team’s first self-designed and built power unit, albeit with Ford’s assistance.
But the unit’s performance in the first test suggested it wasn’t lacking in power, energy management or reliability.
Benchmarking it against the Mercedes is difficult as there is an updated Mercedes PU due for Melbourne and a huge game of cat and mouse was being played with engine modes and fuels levels during testing.
As with the front suspension, the rear wishbone uses relatively flat geometry and not an extreme inclination.
The rear leg of the top wishbone meets the rear wing mounting pylons in typical Red Bull fashion, but not to the same extreme as Aston Martin.
The test2 specification car also ran a vertical vane on the side of the diffuser, in a similar fashion to the Mercedes. Again the tail bodywork volume around the rear impact structure is used to create a small wing above the diffuser to improved expansion of airflow from under the car.
No team will admit they have got the chassis or power unit performance right for the start of the season, with rivals talking up Red Bull’s performance while downplaying their own.
The team have a period to find stability under both the new regs and the new technical management, plus the bedding in process for a new power unit.
Looking at the RB22 and its runs through the Bahrain tests suggest they are in the top4 fight once again.
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Fraser Masefield
