McLaren confirm extreme car changes to defend F1 title

McLaren has committed to "fundamental" changes with its MCL39 car to defend its F1 constructors' title, according to boss Andrea Stella. 

The team enters 2025 as defending constructors' champions for the first time since 1999, and are hoping the MCL39 machine launched at Silverstone will be able to carry Lando Norris or Oscar Piastri to a first drivers' title since 2008. 

By the end of the 2024 campaign, McLaren's MCL38 and Ferrari's SF-24 were the fastest cars, with Red Bull and Mercedes both well behind, with the '25 cars from every team expected to be evolutions of the '24 ones owing to the huge regulation changes coming in for '26. 

RacingNews365 technical analyst Paolo Filisetti was impressed by the 'extreme' changes McLaren had made when the car broke cover at Silverstone, pointing towards the suspension and wishbones in particular.

Expanding on the surgery the new car has had over the winter, Stella detailed the depth of the changes made.

"Pretty much every fundamental component of the layout has been subject to some innovation in order to gain, not only by marginal gains, but some technical opportunities for development," he told media including RacingNews365. 

"It is to then serve the purpose for aerodynamic requirements, or for some other cases, mechanical grip, but the chassis in reality, pretty much from the front-wing, to the gearbox to the crash structure, everything has been subject to optimisation.

"Sometimes this has been incremental, or sometimes actually quite substantially. 

"We have just tried to go as fast as possible in terms of developing the car, which means that there will be some updates during the early races of the season.

"We need to be aggressive with the car to try and cash in as much performance as possible, and the margins are so small that considering the development other teams have had, had we. not gone as fast as possible with development, we might very quickly lose any advantage that we had.

"With four teams on any single weekend in contention to win races, it is very easy to fall from being on pole position to P4 on the grid, so we're full gas in terms of development and we will see if we have been able to develop more than our competitors from 2024 to 2025."