Guenther Steiner has never been much for euphemisms, and he isn’t starting now. With McLaren stumbling through the opening phase of F1’s 2026 regulations, the former Haas boss has delivered a blunt prescription: stop hinting that the customer power unit is the problem and, if you really want control, go and build your own.
The backdrop is uncomfortable reading for a team that arrived this season as the reigning world champion. Nine grands prix into the new era, McLaren has been flatly outgunned by Mercedes, which has seven wins from nine and sits 333 points clear at the top of the constructors’ table. McLaren, by contrast, hasn’t won a race and trails on 179 points — despite the two squads both drawing their power units from Mercedes High-Performance Powertrains.
Andrea Stella has been careful in public, but the message has been consistent: McLaren isn’t getting as much out of the Mercedes package as Mercedes itself. Speaking at Silverstone, Stella pointed to what the data is showing rather than leaning on vague complaints.
“Power unit exploitation and power unit performance are particularly important, and I have to say… that we still seem to have a little bit of a deficit in extracting the most from the HPP power unit,” Stella said. “If you look at the GPS overlays, it becomes apparent that somehow we need to keep our conversation open with HPP, because there’s some performance we seem to be leaving behind.”
It wasn’t an isolated comment, either. Back at the season opener in Australia, he framed it as a learning curve — one where the works team is simply further down the road.
“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,” Stella said then. “Now, it’s not obvious how you do that – for us, we are in a journey of knowledge, but certainly a journey that is at an earlier stage than the works team.”
He added: “What they are doing shows they understand a lot more, and maybe the flow of information hasn’t been as anticipated.”
There’s a reasonable interpretation of Stella’s point: under new rules, a modern power unit isn’t a plug-and-play component, and “exploitation” is an entire discipline in itself. But Steiner isn’t interested in the nuance, and he thinks McLaren’s complaints — however diplomatically dressed — have become a familiar reflex.
Asked on The Red Flags podcast whether McLaren should build its own F1 power unit, he didn’t hesitate.
“Absolutely,” Steiner said. “They are a car manufacturer; they should make their own engine.
“That would take away, because they always when something goes wrong, ‘Oh, the engine, now we don’t get the same engine as Mercedes’.
“They had issues with Renault at the time. They had issues with Honda. It’s always something.”
Steiner’s argument is as much about politics as performance. In his view, if McLaren wants to be treated like a true heavyweight in this era — and stop being drawn into the endless “works vs customer” suspicion whenever results don’t match expectation — it needs to remove the dependency altogether.
“At some stage, you need to be a grown-up, and they’ve got enough money,” he continued. “Zak is pretty good at selling that team, sponsorship. Get the money, instead of putting it in the bank, make your own engine.
“I mean, that would send a message.”
He also pitched it as a commercial play, saying it would benefit McLaren’s road car business and brand positioning. And he pointed to other manufacturers and programmes as proof of concept.
“Red Bull went for it, and they are doing pretty good,” Steiner said. “Audi went for it. They are a car manufacturer, they don’t want to buy a Ferrari engine. They want to stand on their own two feet, they want to be taken seriously.”
Of course, telling McLaren to “just build an engine” is the easy part. Steiner acknowledged the obvious barriers when pressed on why he thinks Woking hasn’t done it.
“Expensive. And difficult,” he said. “It isn’t easy to make an engine, but I think the first hurdle is the money and then the people…
“But at some stage if you are not happy with what you’ve gone, and they are not, what you need to do – you need to do it yourself.”
And that’s the crux of it: Stella’s remarks aren’t really an attack on Mercedes HPP so much as a public admission that McLaren hasn’t fully unlocked what it’s paying for. Yet in a paddock where perception quickly hardens into “they’re blaming the engine”, Steiner’s view is that McLaren is walking straight into a story it can’t win — especially when the same hardware is firing Mercedes to the front.
McLaren’s 2026 issue isn’t one clean culprit anyway. Stella has also referenced shortcomings in the MCL40 chassis, and the team’s own language suggests a blended deficit: car platform, integration, and understanding of the new power unit’s operating window. But in a season where Mercedes is turning the same supplier label into a decisive advantage, McLaren’s frustration is inevitably going to be read as: why can’t you do what they’re doing?
Steiner’s answer is brutal, and maybe a touch performative — but it lands because it speaks to identity as much as lap time. If McLaren wants to play the role of modern superteam under this ruleset, it can’t keep sounding like a customer waiting for a software update.
