McLaren has said the flow of information from its engine supplier Mercedes “hasn’t been as anticipated” under Formula 1’s new regulations and has left the team on the backfoot in trying to exploit the full potential of its power unit this year.
At the opening round of the season in Australia, the reigning champions qualified 0.8 seconds off George Russell‘s pole position time and finished the race more than 50 seconds shy of the lead Mercedes.
McLaren, Williams and Alpine are Mercedes engine customers this year and have all started the season some way off the works team, which appears to be the class of the field based on the first round of the season.
F1 engine suppliers are obliged to offer equal hardware to their customers, but under new regulations for 2026 a huge amount of performance is tied to how the power unit’s hybrid system is operated.
While McLaren has the same power unit at its disposal, it believes it is some way off understanding how to extract the same potential from it as the Mercedes works team.
“We have work to do to exploit the potential of the power unit, which, once I see the potential that HPP [Mercedes High Performance Powertrains] is extracting, looks like there’s more that is available,” McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said.
“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.
“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’ll definitely intensify the collaboration with HPP because our understanding is that there is some low-hanging fruit that we should be able to cash in.”
Although the factory Mercedes team is not obliged to share its secrets with rivals McLaren, Stella said the flow of information from Mercedes’ engine department had not met his team’s expectations.
“What they are doing shows they understand a lot more, and maybe the flow of information hasn’t been as anticipated,” he added.
Stella revealed that McLaren had already raised its concerns with its engine supplier.
“The discussion with HPP about having more information has been going on for weeks,” he said. “Because even in testing, we were pretty much going on track, running the car, looking at the data and, ‘oh, that’s what we have — good, now we have to react to what we have’.
“But that’s not how you work in Formula 1. In Formula 1, what happens on track, you simulate [before], you know what is happening, you know what you are programming, you know how the car is going to behave.
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“So you also have your plans as to how you evolve it that you have figured out before because you know what you are expecting from the car. So, I have to say, since we are a customer team, this is the first time that we feel we are on the back foot even when it comes to the ability to predict how the car will behave and the ability to anticipate how we can improve the car.”
McLaren outperformed Mercedes at the end of the last rules cycle while using its engine, but the operating parameters of the previous generation of power units was well understood and had less of an impact on overall performance.
The extra emphasis on electrical power under the new rules means a difference in approach to one corner can have a significant impact on an entire lap.
“There’s one more factor, though, and this is perhaps for you useful to understand what kind of Formula 1 we are experiencing,” Stella added. “Everything is very sensitive.
“Why are the tools important? Because you may change the amount of lift and coast before Turn 1 and this affects the deployment through the entire lap, which is also what puts off the drivers when they have to optimise the driving, the battery, because this is now a fundamental way of driving a Formula 1 now, you are driving the battery.
“So, when everything is so sensitive, the reliance on the tools is even more important. Like with last year, where everything was calmer in terms of power unit behaviour and electrical energy deployment, we had the tools, but we weren’t so reliant on the tools.
“But now it’s pretty much all about the tools because changing a detail in one place affects something much bigger in a very faraway place of the circuit, which is just difficult to predict.”
Williams team principal James Vowles reported a similar disconnect between his team’s understanding of the Mercedes power unit and that of the works team.
“What Mercedes are doing on the power unit is something that caught us off guard,” Vowles said ahead of Sunday’s race. “It took a qualifying for us to really see just how off the pace we are. In that regard, that’s probably three tenths [missing from the engine] – something in that ballpark.”
Vowles, who left Mercedes to join Williams in 2022, said he also expected the Mercedes engine department to be more open about its class-leading power unit.
“I had expected it to a certain extent, yes. That’s why I said I was caught out yesterday.
“It is not an open door, as you would imagine, because that’s where the performance is found. So it is down to us to try and work around it.
“We have to acknowledge that we, as Williams, do not have the sophistication that they have in other technologies, and definitely that’s on us. I would say the converse is that there’s some inherent knowledge they have which we don’t. And that’s down to us to figure out.”
