McLaren will not bring any further significant upgrades for their car despite the push rivals Red Bull have made in recent races.

The team has only brought new parts for its MCL39 once in the last seven rounds. That is unlikely to change over the remaining races.

“We don’t have new parts here in Mexico, we’re not going to have upgrades – substantial upgrades, at least – for this final part of the season,” McLaren team principal Andrea Stella told the official Formula 1 channel.

While McLaren have slowed their development rate almost to a stop, Red Bull have introduced upgrades nine times in the last 10 events.

Stella said the decision to focus on their car for next year’s new technical regulations came about partly because they were finding it increasingly difficult to improve their current car.

“These cars, especially our car, have reached a level of maturity in terms of technical development which means that we were definitely in the diminishing returns of our aerodynamic development in particular,” he said. “For one point of downforce, it took weeks of development.

“So when you are in this phase and you have a change of regulations, it’s much more efficient to shift your resources and your attention on to next year’s car, which is what we have done for a few weeks now. Because in one week [working] instead on the car for ’26, you can add a lot of performance.

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“So it really depends on where you are, in terms of your rate of development for this year’s car and we were pretty much plateaued.”

McLaren faced the added complication of a reduction in their allowed development time due to their continued success in the constructors’ championship.

“It’s a decision that is an informed decision by looking at your data, by looking at […] for instance how difficult it is to add a single point of aerodynamic efficiency versus the resources, the time, even the usage of the CFD and wind tunnel that we know is restricted,” he said. “The more successful you are the more your resources are restricted in terms of the teraflops that you have available in computer simulation or wind tunnel testing.

“So we need to use our resources in the most effective and efficient way which for us for a few weeks meant that we needed to focus on 2026. We want to keep winning championships in 2026 and this [required] us to focus in this direction and make sure that we hit the track running with a very competitive car in 2026.”

McLaren are in their longest win-less run of the season so far, having gone without a victory in the last four grands prix. However Stella believes they can make their car perform better than it has in recent races.

“There’s a lot that we can still extract from the 2025 car by just optimising the set-up,” he said. “In some of the last few races we left a little bit of performance behind.

“Like for instance in Austin, by not having done the sprint then we couldn’t optimise the ride heights for the main race. So there’s a lot of lap time still that we can extract from this car and we look forward to a strong final part of the season.”

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