McLaren left Melbourne with a bruised ego and a spreadsheet full of awkward questions, but the early-season noise around its Mercedes power unit situation risks becoming a convenient distraction.
Yes, Andrea Stella’s post-race candour was striking. When a reigning champion team principal admits they’re “puzzled” by speed traces from cars on the same engine and calls for tighter “collaboration” with Mercedes HPP, that’s not standard opening-round boilerplate. It spoke to a genuine sense that, under the complexities of the 2026 regulations, McLaren has arrived at the first race still learning how to extract the same performance others are already banking.
But Martin Brundle’s read is the one McLaren will recognise as the more uncomfortable truth: the power unit is only half the story.
The raw numbers from the Australian Grand Prix were damning. Mercedes locked out the front row with George Russell leading a 1-2 in qualifying, and Russell converted it into a comfortable win in the race ahead of Kimi Antonelli. Charles Leclerc completed the podium. McLaren, meanwhile, had Oscar Piastri only fifth on the grid—0.862s off pole—and by the end of 58 laps Lando Norris was the lone finisher in the same position, 51 seconds adrift.
That kind of gap doesn’t come from a single toggle being left in the wrong position. It’s systemic. It’s car, integration, and execution.
Stella’s comments homed in on utilisation: the way McLaren is deploying and harvesting energy, and how that interacts with the new-era package. He’s effectively saying the engine may be the same badge on the casing, but the understanding of its “functions and potential” isn’t equal across the Mercedes family. And, crucially, he framed it as unfamiliar territory for McLaren as a customer team—“the first time that we feel we are on the back foot”—not just in speed, but in predictability and development direction.
Brundle, writing in his Sky Sports F1 column, didn’t disagree with the diagnosis as far as it goes. He noted Norris and the team were “finding chunks of time” as the race unfolded by changing battery harvesting and deployment, and that Norris looked far healthier late on—helped by fresher tyres than the quartet ahead, but also suggesting there was pace being left on the table earlier.
“McLaren will increase competitiveness quickly when they can understand the power unit functions and potential as fully as the Mercedes works team supplier,” Brundle wrote.
Then came the kicker: “They need an aero upgrade too.”
That line matters because it shifts the discussion away from the politically sensitive realm of customer engines and information-sharing, and back into McLaren’s own shop window. If the car’s aerodynamic platform isn’t giving the drivers a stable, efficient window to operate in—especially in a rules reset where the margins live in how cleanly you can run and how consistently you can lean on the tyre—then even perfect energy management only takes you so far.
Melbourne also offered a grim little case study in how fine the edge is right now. McLaren’s weekend was effectively compromised before the lights even went out. Piastri crashed on the formation lap, losing control on the exit of Turn 4 and slamming the barriers hard enough to inflict severe damage to the front-right of his MCL40. It was a miserable moment in front of his home crowd, and it turned McLaren’s race into a one-car damage-limitation exercise before the grand prix had started.
Piastri’s own explanation was telling: an unexpected and “not insignificant” power boost as he accelerated out of the corner, which contributed to the loss of control. Brundle described it as a perfect storm—cool tyres, a power spike, and riding a kerb all at once—and empathised by recalling his own pre-race shunt in the mid-1980s.
You can read that incident two ways. One is simple misfortune and a driver getting caught out. The other is more relevant to McLaren’s bigger concern: in a world where power delivery and energy deployment are deeply intertwined with driveability, the line between “utilisation” and “car behaviour” blurs fast. If you’re still learning the system, you’re also still learning how it bites.
And that’s why Brundle’s aerodynamic point lands. Because if the MCL40 isn’t giving its drivers a broad operating window—if it’s peaky, inconsistent, or simply lacking load—then every variable becomes more difficult to manage: tyre warm-up, traction at low speed, and even how confidently a driver can lean on kerbs without the rear doing something nasty.
Norris’ race underlined the same theme. There was enough evidence to suggest McLaren can claw time back as it better understands the power unit’s deployment tools, but there wasn’t enough to argue the underlying package is close to Mercedes on pure merit. Being 51 seconds behind the winner in P5, even accounting for race context, isn’t a “we’ll fix the settings” sort of problem.
For McLaren, the next few races will define whether Melbourne was merely an ugly opener in a new technical era—or an early warning that it’s chasing two targets at once. Getting on top of the Mercedes PU operational side should bring relatively quick gains, as Brundle suggests. The harder, more expensive and more revealing part is whether McLaren has the aerodynamic headroom to go with it.
If it doesn’t, the power unit debate won’t go away. Not because the engine is necessarily the issue, but because it’s the easiest part of the story to point at when the stopwatch is telling you something you don’t want to hear.
