McLaren boss Andrea Stella has said the team will “intensify” its collaboration with Mercedes amid bafflement at the works team’s considerable Formula 1 power advantage.
The Woking-based squad had been honest in its belief that it was not expecting to be in contention for victory in the season-opening Australian Grand Prix.
And that prophecy came to fruition as Lando Norris finished fifth, almost a minute behind race-winner, Mercedes’ George Russell, with teammate Andrea Kimi Antonelli finishing second.
Mercedes had been the standout favourites for both of McLaren’s titles this year, and its Melbourne showing appeared to corroborate this entirely.
McLaren is one of three other teams using the power unit, complete with its controversial compression ratio loophole, which has been one of the big talking points of the winter.
And Stella was left scratching his head as to how its MCL40 could be that much slower compared to the W17, which could count Ferrari and its SF-26 as its closest competitor.
“I think, in fairness, the gap today was, if anything, similar to what we saw yesterday in qualifying,” the Italian told media, including Motorsport Week.
“There’s performance that needs to come from two main areas. One is the power unit exploitation, and one is having more grip in the corners.
“And in a way, today, I think it was exactly the same. Still, we remain a little puzzled by the difference we see in the data between the speed of our car, and the speed of other cars using the same power unit.
“It clearly indicates that we should be doing a better job in understanding how to utilise the power unit with the complexities that came with the 2026 regulations, so definitely work to do.
“And at the same time, when we look at the GPS overlays, we see that Mercedes is faster in some of the corners.
“Therefore, like I said, we have clear objectives and priorities.
“We need to find a way to extract more out of the power unit, and, on the other side, develop the car. This will take a few races in terms of seeing some major upgrades that can allow us to change a bit the category for which we compete.
“Therefore, I think in these few initial races, we will have to make sure that we extract most of the car in its current configuration.
“But definitely work ahead of us, and the gap at the moment seems to be in the range between half a second and one second.”
Stella sceptical that McLaren is ‘under-exploiting’ the Mercedes PU
In a recent interview with The Times, Hywel Thomas, the chief of Mercedes’ High Performance Powertrains division [HPP], suggested that the works team would possess “links between the engineering groups” and the “more links between the hierarchy of the organisations” would leave the conclusion that someone would “naturally think that there’s a benefit and there’s more advantage.”
Despite this theory being contradicted by the regulations themselves, which state that PUMs must give its customers the same product, Stella is hopeful of increasing its dialogue with Mercedes.
“I can say that we spent a lot of time looking at several overlays, not only, obviously, with HPP teams, in particular Mercedes, but also to other competitors,” he said. “And definitely, like I said before, the result of this analysis seem to direct to the fact that we have work to do as a team in collaboration with our HPP engineers.
“We have work to do to exploit the potential of the power unit, which, once I see the potential that HPP is extracting, looks like there’s more that is available.
“Now, it’s not obvious how you do that. For us, we are in a journey of knowledge. Certainly, a journey that is earlier than their works team.
“The works team and HPP will have worked together for a long time. So they will have collaborated, talked about how to use the power unit. That’s fair enough. But, we will definitely intensify the collaboration with HPP, because our understanding is that there is some low hanging fruit.
“When it comes to, is this all that is available, and that we are under-exploiting, I am not sure.
“I think we will need some more analysis to understand whether this is only about parameters that we can control, or driver’s input that we can control, or some other factors, more systemic, that not necessarily a customer team can control.”
READ MORE – George Russell takes aim at Lando Norris after ‘selfish’ F1 drivers’ 2026 views
Discussion about this post