Racing
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McLaren says its failures in Canada and Monaco have exposed a reliability problem that is “not yet where it needs to be,” with team principal Andrea Stella arguing the team’s customer-engine status has become a genuine disadvantage for the first time.
That shift comes just two races after a Miami double podium that followed McLaren’s first major upgrade of the year. Instead of building on that momentum, the team lost Lando Norris to a gearbox failure in Montreal and then suffered another retirement in Monaco with a power-unit problem.
Stella said the pattern matters more than any single incident. Speaking in Monaco to Motorsport.com, Autosport and other media, he said: “Never before we felt that being a customer team has put us on the back foot.” He made clear that was “not because you are a lower priority for [Mercedes] HPP,” but because a customer team has “less opportunities to integrate, to stay on the same timeline when it comes to addressing reliability problems or exploitation of the power unit from a performance point of view.”
In Stella’s view, the issue is structural rather than a case of one supplier failure. He said McLaren has had “issues pretty much in all areas of the car,” with the Monaco stoppage linked to the power unit while “the gearbox problem on Lando’s car in Canada” was “purely on the McLaren side.”
He tied the wider concern to the current rules cycle, saying there are “many reasons” why power-unit reliability and the benefits of being a works team have “come into focus in 2026” amid “such a major technical regulation change.” The limitation, he said, is in the level of integration available to a customer operation, including matching timelines on fixes, combining chassis and power-unit work, and using facilities in the same way as a factory team.
McLaren is now trying to tackle the problem on two levels with Mercedes HPP. Stella said the existing relationship allows the team to “review item by item, learn from each item and solve it technically,” but added that this alone is not enough “when you don't know what's coming.”
That has pushed McLaren into a broader review of how the two organizations work together. Stella said the team needs to examine “the depth, the intensity and the effectiveness of the various meetings, engagement, sharing of information, processes – from factory to factory, track to track, track to factory, and so on.” He said those conversations “have already started for some months now,” are “relatively wide-ranging,” and reflect the need to operate “at a new level of collaboration” because of “so much novelty” in 2026.
Stella insisted he was “not pointing fingers” at Mercedes HPP and called the partnership “highly successful,” stressing that not all of McLaren’s reliability trouble sits with its engine supplier. But with fixes requiring lead time, the recent run of failures has left McLaren confronting a bigger question than two isolated DNFs: whether its customer-team model can keep pace with the demands of the new regulations.