McLaren make striking F1 admission after Mercedes humbling

McLaren boss Andrea Stella says the team feels "on the back foot" for the first time as a Mercedes F1 engine customer after the Australian GP. 

In Melbourne, George Russell secured pole by 0.862s over the highest placed McLaren of Oscar Piastri in fifth, with the Briton going on to lead a dominant one-two for the High Performance Powertrains (HPP) equipped Mercedes works team. 

In contrast, Lando Norris was the sole McLaren to start and finish, doing so 51.741s behind Russell, as Mercedes cemented itself as the favourites for both championships. 

McLaren is one of four teams using Mercedes HPP power units, with the others being Alpine and Williams, which scored one point between them via Pierre Gasly's 10th place for Alpine, with McLaren becoming the first team in the turbo hybrid era to win F1 titles as a customer in 2024, and again in 2025.

However, for the first time since the McLaren-Mercedes partnership was renewed ahead of the 2021 season, McLaren believes it is on the "back foot" in terms of knowledge of exploiting the power unit, with Alpine and Williams also similarly confounded about how Mercedes is extracting so much performance.

"The discussions with HPP about having more information has been going on for weeks, because even in testing, we were pretty much going on track, running the car, and going: 'Oh, this is what we have. Good. Now let's react to what we have," Stella told media, including RacingNews365. 

"That is not how you work in Formula 1, in Formula 1, what happens on track, you simulate, and you know what is happening, you know what you are programming, you know how the car is going to behave.

"So you have your plans as to how to evolve because you know what you are expecting from the car, so I have to say that since we are a customer team, this is the first time we feel that we are on the backfoot, even when it comes to the ability to predict how the car will behave and the ability to anticipate how we can improve the car.

"We have spent a lot of time looking at several overlays, not only with HPP teams, in particular Mercedes, but also with other competitors.

"The result of this analysis seems to point to the fact that we have a lot of work to do as a team, in collaboration with our HPP engineers, a lot of work to do to exploit the potential of our power unit, which, once I see the potential HPP is extracting, it looks like more is available.

"For us, it is not obvious how to do that; we are on a journey of knowledge, one which is earlier [in its progression] than the works team, so they will have collaborated and talked about how to use the power unit, which is fair enough.

"But we'll definitely intensify the collaboration with HPP because our understanding is that there is some low-hanging fruit that we should be able to machine. 

"When it comes to what is available and if we are under-exploiting, I am not sure. I think we need more analysis to understand whether this is about parameters or driver input, which we can control, or if there are some other factors more systemic that a customer team cannot necessarily control."