Why McLaren won't run on the first day of F1's Barcelona test

McLaren will not run on the opening day of Formula 1's behind-closed-doors test at Barcelona as it sought to maximise the development time of its new title defender - the MCL40.

Audi, Cadillac, Racing Bulls, and now Alpine have given their new 2026 models track time in private shakedown events, aiming to gather early reference points for F1's week of running at Barcelona. This begins on the 26 January, with the circuit booked up for a whole week.

Teams may only use three of the five days to run their cars freely at the Barcelona test, and McLaren has elected to skip the opening day in the process. Instead, the team will spend the days ahead of the test getting its car back from the AVL facilities in Graz, where the MCL40 has been put through its paces on the Austrian engineering company's dyno.

The car will run with a testing livery at Barcelona, ahead of the team's full livery launch on 9 February. The team will shake the car down first before it begins full testing programme across the three allotted days.

"We plan to start testing either in day two or day three," confirmed team principal Andrea Stella. "So we will not be testing in day one. We wanted to give ourselves as much time as possible for development.

"You may know that you are allowed to test three days over the five that are available in Barcelona and then we will start from, either day two or day three and we will test for three days."

Stella explained that the dynamic nature of the 2026 design process, in which he stated that McLaren was finding performance gains almost every day, informed the decision to push back the team's running to the last moment.

Andrea Stella, McLaren

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

He noted that other teams who had already concluded their shakedowns may be able to hit the ground running sooner at Barcelona, but felt that doing so would create a compromise in committing to certain design elements that may not be as advanced.

"Actually this was always going to be plan A [to hold off on running]," he added. "There's also so much of a change that we don't need to be necessarily the first on track.

"We wanted to give, like I said before, as much time as possible for development because every day of development every day of design was adding a little bit of performance.

"This also means that if you are early on track, you will have the reassurance of knowing what you need to know as soon as possible - but at the same time it means that you might have committed to the design and the realisation of the car relatively early.

"So you will have a compromise against development time and ultimate performance.

"Obviously there will be updates pretty much I guess for every car between testing and at least testing in Barcelona and the first race.

"But we thought that in the economy of a season it was important to start and launch the car in the most competitive package and configuration that's why we pushed all the timing to the limit - but within a very manageable limit. We are on plan to be testing on day two and we didn't feel any urge to plan for testing on day one."