The Briefing: 2026 Monaco Grand Prix – powered by Google Cloud

Welcome to The Briefing, where we’ll be answering the key on-track questions ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix.

Each week, powered by Google Cloud, one of our trackside experts will join us to explain all of the weekend’s biggest talking points. This week, ahead of FP1, we spoke with Chief Technical Officer & Chief Designer Rob Marshall.

Monaco is as unique a venue as they come in Formula 1. As well as being the shortest circuit on the calendar – and home to the shortest race distance – it is also the narrowest. Driver confidence is key, making it the track at which we prioritise mileage in Free Practice more than anywhere else.

F1’s new generation of cars add an extra layer of intrigue to what is already one of the sport’s most fascinating weekends. There are plenty of questions about how the new cars, their new modes, and the increased importance of energy conservation will respond to a circuit known less for its straights than for its tight, twisting corners.

With the help of Rob, we’ll look to answer all of the above and more in this week’s edition of The Briefing.

Is this a traditional Monaco weekend, or are experiments planned?

Little of both! With the pressures of a Sprint weekend, it's always difficult to get things tested, when you need to concentrate on general setup work. This is the first ‘normal’ weekend for a while – but then again, it’s not normal because it’s Monaco, and we really don’t want to disrupt the drivers here. They get quicker and quicker, the more laps they complete, even if the car remains the same – so you don’t want to be wasting a lot of time doing tests.

There will be some Monaco-specific parts on the car. Teams don’t compromise their standard front suspension design to cope with things like Loew’s Hairpin, so people tend to run here with modified racks, rack stops or different length steering arms. Like everyone else, we’ll have bespoke steering components for this race.

And we will have a genuine development test in that we’ll take another look at the front wing that was tested in Canada. We’ll run it in FP1 on one of the cars, for at least one run, but probably not beyond that, as we’re looking to develop it further.

Circuit-specific aero hasn’t been a factor with these active aero cars. Is that still the case for Monaco, despite there being no Straight Mode zones?

Straight Mode is interesting this year. At a lot of circuits, where traditionally we know what to do with the car, it’s making us rethink all of our baselines. The car this year has a similar downforce level to what we would have run at Monza last year – but you run it everywhere.

No Straight Mode in Monaco, so it becomes more like a normal car, so we’ll be locking-out the front and rear wings, and not shedding any downforce in straight line mode, because there isn’t one. We’ll strip-out the mechanisms that operate the wings, because that saves a little weight and reduces risks.

We will be looking to get the highest downforce package on the car in a way you would normally do in Monaco. What we don’t have is a massive rear wing to go with it, because the wings we have are already constrained by the legality boxes: they’re already as big as they can be.

What sort of compromises do you make for Sunday at a Grand Prix with such a heavy Qualifying bias?

Again, things may be different this year, but yes, Monaco is all about performance on Saturday and then holding it together on Sunday. I suspect that won’t change. Qualifying is still hugely important and then not dropping the ball on Sunday is the next thing. The things that have always been important will continue to be so, and you really don’t want to qualify well and then not be able to finish the race because of your Qualifying setup. Your approach to Qualifying needs to include a car which you know you can race competitively… while being very much biased to Qualifying.

With Pirelli’s removal of a C6 tyre from their range, we’re nominally a step harder this year. This is presumably primarily of interest for Qualifying?

It shouldn’t have a huge impact on the race – though your opportunity to advance could well come down to undercuts and overcuts, and in those situations, tyre management will be important: good in-laps to squeeze the last out of the tyre, and getting tyres up to temperature on out-laps too, because an undercut won’t work if your tyre warm-up is poor.

Regarding Qualifying, of course getting the tyres into the window is critical. It’s a strange circuit in that getting a perfect lap is very difficult because of traffic, and this will certainly be a factor in Q1 with 22 cars this year. So, the ability to do consecutive laps is important, even if that is not as performant as fast>slow>fast.

These cars will find that a bit easier than their predecessors. The 2026 car basically fills and drains the battery on every straight and corner, and in Monaco we’ll be energy-rich, compared to other circuits. Being able to do fast>quite-fast>quite-fast may be the way forward – a little like the sort of run plan you might see on a wet track elsewhere – because that middle lap may be where traffic is lightest. Something to figure out during practice.

As an aside, I think the drivers will be at their happiest so far this year in terms of what the car feels like. It'll be most like the driving experiences of the past where they get to drive flat-out. They're not worried about trashing their battery and saving energy at end of straights. In Qualifying, they will be maximum attack for the whole lap. They will not be trying to go slowly in a given corner just so they can go fast in a subsequent straight, which has been a complaint up until now. Monaco's energy-rich enough from a PU point of view to not need to do that.

Follow all of the action this weekend via the McLaren Racing App, available to download on Android and iOS.