McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella has made a brutal admission about the team’s performances to date in Formula 1 in 2026.
The reigning champions look to have taken a step backwards this season in the new technical regulations era, the MCL40 particularly struggling in high-speed corners.
But McLaren’s issues are not just relegated to the chassis, electrical and power unit gremlins have also played a part in the team’s struggles.
Reigning world champion Lando Norris has been particularly badly affected, suffering two consecutive failures in Canada, owing to gearbox and battery issues respectively.
Barcelona appeared to indicate improvement, with both cars finishing inside the points, a point Stella highlighted
“Finally, a relatively calm and clean weekend from a reliability point of view,” he told media, including Motorsport Week.
“Of course, we don’t have to forget that in some of the previous weekends we didn’t only have problems on Sunday but we also had problems affecting practice. So there’s been improvement from this point of view.”
Reliability still a major issue for McLaren
Stella however, then made the admission that McLaren simply must improve its reliability, stating “we have quite a lot to improve”.
“Reliability, you know, I don’t want to judge it in a single race. I would like to judge it in a season and say we had a couple of exceptions. But we have to rebuild from where we were, so we take one race at a time, one event at a time. Good that we haven’t had any issues here in Spain. We have definitely raised the bar, the level of attention, used the situations we had in the previous races to reset and increase the standards in the way we do things.”
This is McLaren and this is also McLaren, our suppliers and our collaboration with HPP. We need to retain the standards. The mission is very clear. We only want to think about performance, an area of performance in which we also have quite a lot to improve.”
McLaren suffered a further complication in Barcelona, as Ferrari now seems to have overtaken it in F1’s cutthroat development race, so catching Ferrari and Mercedes will continue to take a back seat while it focuses on reliability.
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