MOTORSPORT – FORMULA One’s teams and their superstar drivers will have their work cut out for them when they hit the track at Bahrain International Circuit (BIC) starting today for six days of F1 Aramco Pre-Season Testing 2026.
This was acknowledged last night by McLaren team principal Andrea Stella, who has been one of the key driving forces in the Bahrain-owned outfit’s back-to-back F1 constructors’ world championships.
Stella, a 25-year veteran of F1, revealed that McLaren – and likely all the other teams – are already working around the clock in double shifts to get ready for the 2026 FIA F1 World Championship, which will feature sweeping new regulations that revolve around the new generation F1 car that is more agile and thus promotes more exciting action on track.
“When you are in testing, you work around the clock – it is 24 hours,” Stella said last night during the official launch Press conference of the F1 Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix 2026, taking place April 10 to 12 at BIC.
“I go to sleep at some stage (laughs), but we have two shifts – all teams I think nowadays have two shifts – and we work 24 hours because the cars are new and there are so many things to do.
“A Formula One car – when you see it, it is a single piece – but in fact, it is never together unless it is ready to go on track. Otherwise, it is a combination of parts, and they go to areas where they go through revision and servicing, and then they will be assembled again.”
In his decorated career, Stella has been instrumental to the successes of F1 legends such as Michael Schumacher, Kimi Raikkonen, and Fernando Alonso – and now McLaren’s Norris and Piastri – while the cars he has helped put out on the tarmac have won five times at BIC – four during his days with Ferrari and last year with McLaren when Piastri claimed their first-ever triumph in Sakhir.
The 54-year-old Italian explained that McLaren have been developing their 2026 contender known as the MCL40 for more than a year-and-a-half leading up to their spectacular launch event at BIC held on Monday night, which was attended by His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Crown Prince and Prime Minister.
“For us at McLaren, the 2026 car has been a project we’ve been working on for 19 months – since the middle of 2024 when we were designing the 2026 car. It was a big undertaking not only for McLaren, but pretty much everyone – an intense period of design, manufacturing and innovation.”
Stella said that the 2026 season will be “a battle for evolution and development”, something he is excited about especially with McLaren being defending F1 constructors’ world champions.
“When you are in a position we were in the past, you would like to continue it,” claimed Stella. “We had a very fast car and we were mastering the regulations, but at the same time Formula One is about innovation, it’s about evolution, and for us this is definitely extra motivation.
“We want to prove to ourselves that we can achieve the same positions from a success point of view, even with different regulations.
“This doesn’t mean that we will be able to do it at the first race, because in 2026 it will be a game of performance evolution. Easily, the cars will gain one second over its development across the season. It’s more a battle of evolution and development rather than at the starting point of the first race.”
Stella noted that McLaren had a positive ‘shakedown’ in Barcelona last month, which was crucial ahead of pre-season testing in the kingdom.
“With cars that are so new, they are not only new from what we can see – they are new completely, so thousands and thousands of parts that needed to be redesigned. There was pretty much no carry over of any part from the 2025 cars.
“Definitely the car had to be shaken down – we needed to see system reliability. We found some problems here and there, we were able to resolve them, and we ran quite reliably on day three of the test (in Barcelona), which allowed us to understand also a performance point of view.”
Of the upcoming six days on track in Bahrain – from today until Friday and then again from February 18 to 20 – Stella said: “First of all, it’s a great pleasure to be here again – it’s a lovely place to be, the weather is fantastic, and this is a circuit where we definitely can test the new regulations to the full extent.
“It will be an important session of six days. When it comes to day one, it will not necessarily be the aim to do as much mileage as possible. We also want to start understanding the behaviour of some performance aspects of the car. This sometimes requires systematic work and also some procedures, so we will see a variety of runs.
“It is important to characterise the behaviour of aerodynamics, because you need to relate the track data, with the data in the wind tunnel, and the data in the computer simulations. There will be a variety of tests.”
This year’s F1 pre-season tests will be the sixth consecutive year that Sakhir has been selected as the venue for F1’s most important preparation period ahead of the new world championship. Testing was first held in Bahrain in 2009 and then again in 2014. They have since taken place in Bahrain each year from 2021.
The event will bring together all 11 F1 teams and it will be the first opportunity for fans in Bahrain and worldwide to see the brand new Cadillac F1 Team, who are set to join McLaren, Mercedes, Red Bull Racing, Ferrari, Williams, Racing Bulls, Aston Martin, Haas, Audi, and Alpine in motorsport’s top flight.
patrick@gdnmedia.bh
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