McLaren admit Mercedes relationship has become F1 2026 disadvantage

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella believes its status as a Mercedes HPP engine customer has placed it on the "backfoot" in the 2026 season. 

Of the top four teams - Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren, and Red Bull - it is only Stella's McLaren which is not a works team when it comes to the power unit, and buys in a Mercedes HPP supply. 

In 2024 and 2025, McLaren became the first customer team to win the constructors' championship in the turbo hybrid era, with Lando Norris becoming the first customer-team driver to win the drivers' title in '25.

However, at the start of F1's new regulations with the complex new power units, McLaren's title defence has been hampered - through a combination of its own unreliability and that of Mercedes HPP. 

In China, both Norris and Oscar Piastri failed to start following power unit glitches, with Stella saying around this time that the team needed more information from HPP to understand how to better extract performance.

 Going further, the Italian has detailed how, in his view, being a customer squad has placed the team on the "backfoot" for the season.

"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.

"When I say this, and I want to be clear here, to avoid any misunderstanding, it's not because you are a lower priority for Mercedes HPP, it's 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. 

"When you have some experiments on the chassis side, you can add to a long run of the power unit when you are a works team. 

"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. I

"I think these reliability issues have made it into 2026, where we had such a large technical regulation change from a power, from a performance point of view

"There are many related to the power unit, but there are some, like the gearbox problem on Lando's car in Canada, which are purely on the McLaren side. 

"So, I just want to be totally fair to our unit supplier, with whom we have a fantastic, very successful relationship, and still the relationship is great. 

"The great relationship allows us to review item by item, learn from each item, and solve it technically, but when you don't know what's coming, it's not sufficient to simply address item by item. 

"You need to review ultimately the depth, the intensity and the effectiveness of the various meetings, engagement, sharing of information processes, both from factory to factory, track to track, track to factory, and so on."