Andrea Stella says that the car McLaren runs over the next two races will be "entirely new".

In many ways the back-to-back world champions season didn't get underway until Japan, with Oscar Piastri failing to start the season opener, his home race in Australia, and both cars failing to make it to the grid in China.

In Japan Piastri finished second and Lando Norris fifth, but the Woking outfit is aware that other than the challenge of closing the gap to Mercedes, it has to fend off a hard charging Ferrari.

All the teams will have used the enforced break since Suzuka to upgrade their cars - even Mercedes - and Ferrari is understood to have a whole raft of upgrades for next week, as has Red Bull, which is said to have its own version of the Scuderia's rotating rear wing.

However, Stella suggests that the changes to the MCL40 are more than just an upgrade.

"In our intent, there was always the idea to deliver sort of a completely new car, especially from an aerodynamic upgrades point of view, for the North American races," says the Italian.

"Obviously, the fact that the calendar has been changed sort of helped a little bit," he continues, "like I'm sure it helped all the other teams that could work more streamlined towards upgrading the car rather than being busy with racing. But I could say overall that across Miami and Canada, we will see an entirely new MCL40.

"I would like to stress that this is what I would expect of most of our competitors," he adds. "So not necessarily it's going to be a shift in the pecking order, it will be effectively just a check who has been able to add more performance within the same time frame. And we also have some performance to recover if we look at Mercedes and to some extent Ferrari as well.

"We are quite happy with the development that we've been able to manage in the background. So hopefully we should be able to see a slightly more competitive MCL40 in Miami and then in Canada, considering that the last race was already a decent competitive performance in Japan. So we definitely look forward to the next races."

The performance in Japan, following the disaster of the opening two races, together with Stella's claims of a "new car", brings back memories of the Woking team's epic turnaround in 2023.

"We take quite a bit of pride internally at McLaren that we managed to turn things around in a continuity of regulations," he admits. "So we had kind of less know-how, we needed to generate IP, we needed to generate the solutions to gain a performance and competitive advantage, and since 2023 we managed to do it.

"This was something that we definitely wanted to crystallise in terms of our own achievement and consolidate the success that we've been able to produce.

"At the same time, while for sure we would have liked to continue with the same regulations because we were starting from a competitive position, we sort of wanted to test ourselves. We wanted to test our level of maturity, our level of ability to generate new know-how when there's a change, a reset of the regulations. So while slightly uncomfortable, it's actually a challenge that we welcome. It's a challenge that will give us a measure of where we are effectively as a team.

"I have to say that even some of the challenges that we started with in terms of the start of the season, with a little bit of a mixed bag, kind of make the overall test even more probing, but even more interesting," he smiles.

"We are enjoying it, we look forward to show on track what we've been able to produce in the ground over this month, especially the last couple of months. I think they've been quite positive in terms of development of the car in the ground. Hopefully we will see this in Miami, Canada and the following races in terms of development."

Of course, it is not only the McLaren that will be new, the FIA and F1 having announced a number of "refinements" to the rules earlier this week.

Stella, who had previously warned about the potential issues the sport could face under the 2026 regulations, believes the "refinements" are a positive step.

"I think the changes that are implemented for Miami are a positive step in the right direction," he says, "tendentially addressing all these elements that we had already highlighted during the testing Bahrain.

"I think Formula 1 as a community should remain quite open that once we observe the outcome and the effect of this package of changes, we may have learned more about the new regulation and further tuning may be required," he admits, "and we should have the openness and the proactivity to study this further improvement and put them in place.

"Finally, there should be a consideration for some hardware changes, more for the longer term, such that we can place the operating point of the power unit somewhere where less compromises are required from a chassis point of view or from a driving point of view. We think this is possible, and we think that all stakeholders should approach this conversation with the willingness to contribute."

Referring to the most controversial aspect of the 2026 regulations, the 50/50 power split and the consequential need for energy management, he believes there is still room for improvement despite this week's "refinements".

"I think in order to have a more substantial improvement whereby we reduce some of the, for instance, shortage from an energy point of view or the fact that in high-speed corners sometimes you don't have much deceleration between the braking point and the mid-corner speed, there may be some need to act on the hardware.

"But once you act on the hardware from a battery capacity point of view, for instance, or in terms of the ICE accepting more fuel flow, then this requires more time than from one race to the other and possibly more time even than from one session to the other.

"There's certainly conversations already happening as to how the hardware can be more fundamentally improved such that the regulations allow more margin to fulfil the various objectives which are required for the spectacle and entertainment, but also for making sure that the drivers can drive in a traditional sense of pushing the car to the limit."