Racing
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McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says the team’s difficult start to Formula 1’s 2026 rules era comes down in large part to one thing: as a Mercedes customer, McLaren cannot match the integration that works teams have between chassis and power unit development.
Stella said McLaren is uniquely exposed among the leading teams because Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull all operate as works power-unit outfits, while McLaren buys its engine from Mercedes HPP. That, he said, leaves McLaren with “fewer opportunities to integrate” and to stay on “the same timeline” when reliability fixes and performance extraction need to happen together.
“I’ve said before, like never before, we felt that being a customer team has put us on the backfoot,” Stella told media including RacingNews365. He stressed that the issue is “not because you are a lower priority for Mercedes HPP,” but because “you have fewer 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.”
The shift is significant because McLaren had just broken new ground as a customer team before the regulation reset. It won the constructors’ championship in both 2024 and 2025, becoming the first customer team to do so, and Lando Norris then became the first driver from a customer team to win the drivers’ title in 2025.
Under the new regulations, Stella said, that disadvantage has been exposed by reliability trouble on both sides of the McLaren-Mercedes package. He pointed to China, where Norris and Oscar Piastri both failed to start because of power-unit glitches, while also making clear that not every problem sits with the supplier. Stella cited “the gearbox problem on Lando’s car in Canada” as an issue that was purely on McLaren’s side.
His broader argument was that a works structure can combine chassis experiments with a longer power-unit program in ways a customer team cannot. Stella said there are “many reasons why reliability associated to power unit or taking advantage of being a works team from a power unit point of view” can make the difference, adding that the reliability problems have carried into a season shaped by “such a large technical regulation change from a power, from a performance point of view.”
Stella was careful not to turn the criticism into an attack on Mercedes. He said McLaren still has “a fantastic, very successful relationship” with its power-unit supplier and that the partnership remains strong enough to review problems item by item, learn from them and solve them technically.
But he also made clear that this is no longer enough for a team trying to defend titles under a new rules package. After a clean weekend in Spain, following earlier events in which reliability issues disrupted practice running and left Norris sidelined during sessions, Stella said one trouble-free race does not resolve the wider problem. McLaren, he said, needs a deeper review of “the depth, the intensity and the effectiveness” of information-sharing and engagement processes “from factory to factory, track to track, track to factory, and so on.”
That matters because McLaren is already 126 points behind constructors’ leader Mercedes, and Stella said the team’s objective is now simple: eliminate the reliability noise so it can “only want to think about performance.”