Toto Wolff wasn’t particularly interested in playing the “secret Mercedes engine mode” game in Shanghai. Instead, he pointed to something far more mundane — and far more revealing about the new 2026 landscape — when asked why McLaren and the other Mercedes customers haven’t quite matched the works team’s early-season punch.
Gear ratios, Wolff said, are one of the areas where McLaren has gone its own way.
That matters because the sport’s new ruleset has amplified the value of getting the whole package to talk to itself. Everyone in the Mercedes orbit might be running the same HPP hardware and software, but that doesn’t mean they’re arriving at the same answers once those components are bolted into different cars, wrapped in different aero philosophies, and calibrated around different assumptions of how performance will be accessed over a lap.
“Everybody has a different concept,” Wolff explained after Sprint qualifying at the Chinese Grand Prix. And with McLaren, “they have taken some decisions that are very different to ours, when it comes, for example, to gear ratios. So, that could have been good, or could have been bad.”
It was a neat way of reframing a conversation that has been simmering since Melbourne. McLaren and Williams have both talked about Mercedes seemingly extracting performance from the power unit that they can’t yet access, while McLaren boss Andrea Stella referenced a lack of information coming from Mercedes High Performance Powertrains. Wolff’s counter is essentially: you’re not losing time because we’re hiding a magic button; you’re losing time because you’re still learning how your own car wants to be driven — and how your chosen mechanical and operational set-up intersects with this new power unit era.
Shanghai offered fresh evidence that Mercedes has started 2026 with its homework done. George Russell put the car on Sprint pole, and rookie Kimi Antonelli backed him up for another front-row lockout. Wolff was understandably upbeat, praising an early harmony between chassis and power unit.
“I’m really happy. The integration, power unit and chassis, works well,” he said. He also made a point of highlighting that the advantage, at least right now, isn’t simply coming down the straights.
“What I’m really pleased of is how the car drives… the car is on the rails, and most of the lap time gained that we have is in the corners.”
That line will have caught the attention of more than a few engineers up and down the pitlane. Customers can spend an entire season chasing “missing” power only to realise later that what they were really watching was a works team with a better-balanced car, a cleaner platform, and fewer compromises in how aggressively it can be leaned on through direction changes. In other words: if Mercedes is telling the world its time is in the corners, the engine narrative starts looking like a convenient oversimplification.
For McLaren, the timing is delicate. This is a team that arrives in 2026 as the reigning double champion, and it’s already being asked — politely, but persistently — why the benchmark in the Mercedes family has shifted back to Brackley so quickly. Shanghai’s Sprint qualifying result at least hinted at momentum. Lando Norris, the reigning world champion, qualified third, with Oscar Piastri fifth. Norris was still six tenths away from Russell, but that represented a two-tenth gain on the one-lap deficit to Mercedes from Melbourne.
Stella framed it as progress — not in some headline-grabbing upgrade sense, but in the unglamorous, performance-unlocking sense.
“I think there’s some indications of improvements, especially… in the way we understand how to use the power unit,” Stella said, noting there was “less variability” in practice and more clarity over deployment and operation when it mattered in qualifying.
That’s the subtext to Wolff’s gear-ratio remark. It’s not a jab for the sake of it; it’s a reminder that even with shared supply, each team is still making bets — sometimes big ones — on how to shape the car around the regulations. A gear ratio choice is effectively a statement of intent. It says something about where you expect to harvest performance, how you expect to manage energy across a lap, and what you think the car’s aerodynamic behaviour will look like in different phases of the corner.
And the brutal part of 2026 is that you don’t get to isolate those decisions. A “good” ratio on paper can become the wrong one if your car doesn’t rotate in the places you expected, or if your drivers are forced into operating windows that make the PU feel inconsistent. That’s why Stella’s emphasis on understanding — rather than simply speed — felt telling.
Wolff, for his part, sounded confident that the customer field will converge. He even leaned into the argument that it’s ultimately a solvable puzzle: “You have the exact same hardware, you have the exact same software.” The differentiator, he implied, is how effectively teams simulate, integrate and apply it — and how quickly they can iterate once the season starts firing questions at them.
Still, there’s an edge to all this. The opening rounds have shown that “works advantage” isn’t just a talking point; it’s real, and it’s immediate. Wolff referenced Ferrari and Audi as integrated structures with inherent benefits because they “learn early”. In a world where margins are being defined by how cleanly the car and power unit cooperate, early learning is a weapon.
The bigger intrigue is how quickly McLaren can turn that learning into results. Wolff called it a “formidable structure” and predicted it won’t be long before it’s fighting at the front. Stella, meanwhile, sounded content to define the near-term target as being best of the rest behind Mercedes — a surprisingly modest framing for a team that walked into the season as the holder of both crowns.
The Sprint will be the next data point, but the pattern is already clear: 2026 isn’t just about who has the best engine, or even the best aero. It’s about who makes the fewest wrong calls while everyone else is still figuring out what the right questions are.
