The Briefing: 2026 United States Grand Prix – Powered by Google Cloud

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

The team heads into this latest triple-header hoping to kick-start a strong run on a technical, high-downforce circuit we believe better suits the MCL40's current characteristics.  

With Rob’s help, we’ll explain why this is and dig deeper into the present strengths of our 2026 challenger. We’ll also share our latest reflections on the new regulations and provide our usual thoughts on this weekend’s track and what we’re hoping to learn in Practice.  

Is there anything new on the car this weekend?

Not much new for this weekend – there are some modest bits starting off this triple header. We will be testing the new components during practice, like we’ve seen throughout the season when introducing anything as part of our development pathway. 

In Singapore, Will Joseph described the current iteration of the MCL40 as ‘fast, but tricky’. What does that mean?

It means the cars are quite fast and quite tricky! This is about the operating window: the car has quite a narrow window in which it wants to operate – both the car itself but also the power unit. Getting a car that’s very fast, and drivable, with aerodynamics that are not too sensitive to variations in ride height is… tricky.

Is the focus in Practice on learning how to get the car into that narrow window, or on holistically widening the window?

Both. I think this is probably true for any formula at any point in time: you’re always trying to broaden the window in ways that won’t limit the peaks; and you’re always trying to exploit everything you can from the car. The short-term point of view for the trackside team is trying to maximise everything you can for this weekend, while back at the factory, everyone is looking longer term, trying to develop something that’s broader and more stable.

COTA has a lot of bumps, which presents problems for ride height, stiffnesses, and plank legality. Where do you want to put the car to cope?

Historically, COTA is always a challenge through the high-speed corners, both because of the bumps – which vary year on year – and also because you have to clip the kerbs. It’s a challenge for the car and also for the drivers, and you have to get it right through that stuff – but there’s a good mix of other corner tyres as well, and those require different setups, but you only get to put one on the car, so it’s very much a compromise.  

Quite where you choose to make that compromise is a good question. You don’t really know until you see what opportunities are there. It's really knowing what your potential gains and losses are around the lap by making a given setup change - where you're going to rob from Peter to pay Paul, but you always want to do it the way that you end up with more in your pocket at the end of the day. Sometimes it can be by strengthening the areas where you’re strong, and other times it might be giving up a little bit there for a larger gain elsewhere. It’s definitely something we’ll find out across the practice sessions. 

Does the team now have a good understanding of the upgrade introduced in Baku? 

We’re happy with the Baku upgrade. We see the numbers and the performance it’s giving us. We haven’t seen a relative benefit compared to the opposition, as they also have either brought impressive upgrades of their own, or made impressive improvements in how they operate their existing packages – but we’re happy that our upgrade was a good step in the right direction.  

I think the leading teams are continuing to impress each other with the significant chunks of performance everyone is finding – when what you really want is to be the only team that finds that extra pace. Unfortunately, there isn't a rule that says others can't do a good job as well!  

Circuit sensitivity is clearly a very strong player this year, and we’re seeing it week-in, week-out. Were we to go back to a circuit like Zandvoort or the Hungaroring that really suited the MCL40, I suspect we’d probably be favourites.  

It’s very interesting, with the hierarchy switching around almost weekly. It has, at times, looked like one team has an advantage so massive the pack can’t possibly catch up… and then the next week it’s completely turned on its head, like the cars have all been thrown in the air and landed in a different order. We think we know who's really strong in the low speed, who's really strong in the high speed and who's strong in the medium speed, and who likes straight lines and who's good over kerbs… but it does seem to change quite a lot.  

At the start of the season, with these regulations still fresh, there seemed to be a lot of low-hanging fruit in design terms. Has that period concluded?  

Certainly, it’s getting harder, but there are still opportunities. Just looking at the cars, there are quite a few areas of difference, even looking only across the top four teams. You think ultimately there must be one solution that is optimum – and if there is, we haven’t converged on it yet. Different theories and philosophies remain. However, I think it's fair to say it is starting to get harder to find big gains.  

Clearly, we're getting into the design of new cars now, and next year's regulations are pretty similar to this year's. There are some changes, but they're modest by comparison with what we dealt with coming into this year. So, I think most of what we learned and experienced this year will apply next year, whereas that clearly wasn't the case going from ‘25 into ‘26. So, we may be into… not small gains, but perhaps medium-sized gains… but everyone still has the potential to pull a rabbit out of a hat.