Andrea Stella isn’t buying the idea that McLaren’s Mercedes power is somehow a “different” Mercedes power — but he is conceding, pretty openly now, that Woking isn’t getting as much out of it as Brackley is.
As the 2026 season ticks on, the contrast has become difficult to ignore. Mercedes has won all but two Grands Prix so far, while McLaren — reigning world champions — are still waiting for their first victory of the year. Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri have kept the trophy cabinet from gathering dust with a scattering of podiums, yet most weekends McLaren’s fight has looked less like a title defence and more like a tug-of-war with Red Bull for “best of the rest” behind Mercedes and Ferrari.
Stella’s read on it is a blend of car and craft. On the one hand, he says McLaren simply slipped on its own development trajectory during a chunk of 2025, forced into a more defensive posture by Red Bull and Max Verstappen rather than maintaining the “gradient” of progress it wanted. That has knock-on consequences in a regulation cycle where early gains tend to compound.
But Stella also pointed to something more sensitive: not the hardware itself, but the operational know-how required to make the most of it — and the reality that Mercedes, as the factory operation, is currently doing a better job.
“Power unit exploitation and power unit performance are particularly important,” Stella said, arguing McLaren is leaving lap time on the table even though it’s buying from the same Mercedes High Performance Powertrains pool as the works team. In his estimate, there are “three to four tenths” in play, with a portion tied to the car’s overall development deficit and another portion linked to how effectively McLaren is extracting performance from the package.
Silverstone was the weekend that seems to have crystallised the point internally. It’s an energy-sensitive circuit in these regulations, and Stella said the GPS traces made it hard to pretend everything was being maximised.
“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,” he said.
That “conversation” line mattered, because it speaks to where modern F1 lives: not in the blunt question of whether the engine is “the same”, but in the details around deployment, cooling, installation, drivability, and the small procedural tricks that can turn a decent straight into a fast one.
McLaren’s engineers had another reminder of that at Silverstone when Mercedes’ drivers were seen using an unusual technique on the run to the finish line — effectively lifting in a way that suggested a specific deployment or harvesting strategy. Stella admitted it caught McLaren off guard.
“It kind of surprised us a little bit, because it’s not something that we discussed,” he said, adding he wasn’t even sure it was available to McLaren without “further elements” needed to run the power unit in that mode.
That, right there, is the nuance that tends to get lost when fans reach for the familiar “customer vs works” storyline. Regulations force suppliers to provide parity in terms of what’s supplied, and there are strict provisions governing what must be shared. But the new-generation power units are complex enough that performance isn’t just about what arrives in the crate; it’s about how you integrate it, understand it, and use it — and how quickly you can turn lessons into repeatable procedure.
Stella was careful to steer away from conspiracy and towards process. He praised the Mercedes unit as “brilliant” technology and insisted McLaren has no trust issue with HPP. In fact, he leaned heavily on history: the supplier relationship that underpins McLaren’s back-to-back Constructors’ titles in 2024 and 2025 hasn’t suddenly become toxic because 2026 has started awkwardly.
“We trust HPP; we have had such a great collaboration in previous years,” Stella said. “They have been totally instrumental in McLaren becoming world champion twice.”
Still, McLaren’s current situation is complicated by specification timing. Stella confirmed McLaren hasn’t yet been fitted with the latest-spec HPP power unit that Mercedes is running, nor the version that fellow customers Alpine and Williams have already received. The reason, he said, is largely mundane: mileage cycles and allocation logistics. In other words, it’s not simply a case of “give us the new one”; it’s about when each team’s pool makes sense to rotate.
McLaren expects that to change soon.
“We understand the reasoning,” Stella said, indicating he hopes the updated units can arrive as early as the next event at Spa. He also suggested that, at least as far as McLaren understands it, these updates are framed more as reliability-related changes than a pure performance step — meaning it may not be the magic bullet some will assume.
Where Stella did allow a hint of frustration was in acknowledging that customer teams can end up reactive by nature, especially when everyone is operating at maximum speed. HPP is developing, firefighting reliability issues and supplying four teams at once; McLaren is trying to develop its own car quickly enough to stop the gap to Mercedes and Ferrari from becoming a season-defining feature.
In that environment, Stella argued, it’s easy for marginal gains — a briefing here, an operational tweak there — to arrive later than ideal.
“I think it’s quite natural that, as a customer team, you remain a bit on the back foot,” he said.
It’s also an uncomfortable dynamic given the recent history between these two organisations. McLaren beating Mercedes to consecutive titles with Mercedes power was precisely the scenario Toto Wolff once framed as an “enemy in the house”. That label might have been delivered with a degree of theatre, but it captured something real about the tension that can exist when your customer starts taking your lunch money.
Stella’s public posture, though, is clear: McLaren’s job is to close its own gaps — in car development and in exploiting what it already has — rather than hinting at anything more political. The takeaway from his comments isn’t that McLaren thinks it’s being short-changed. It’s that, in 2026, “same engine” has never meant “same outcome”, and McLaren knows it has to get sharper in the margins if it wants to turn a quiet title defence into a real one.
